100

PHOTOGRAPHS | the most influential images of all

time
One of the three photographers who documented the construction of Rockefeller
Center and the now-iconic Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
Philippe Halsman in his studio, circa 1950
100 | table of contents

DEFINING INFLUENCE by Ben Goldberger, Paul Moakley and

Kira Pollack

PROOF OF LIFE by Geoff Dyer

ICONS

ABRAHAM LINCOLN by Mathew Brady

LUNCH ATOP A SKYSCRAPER by Unknown

COUPLE IN RACCOON COATS by James VanDerZee

MIGRANT MOTHER by Dorothea Lange

FORT PECK DAM by Margaret Bourke-White

WINSTON CHURCHILL by Yousuf Karsh

AMERICAN GOTHIC by Gordon Parks

BETTY GRABLE by Frank Powolny

FLAG RAISING ON IWO JIMA by Joe Rosenthal

RAISING A FLAG OVER THE REICHSTAG by Yevgeny Khaldei

V-J DAY IN TIMES SQUARE by Alfred Eisenstaedt

GANDHI AND THE SPINNING WHEEL by Margaret Bourke-White

THE BABE BOWS OUT by Nat Fein

COUNTRY DOCTOR by W. Eugene Smith

CAMELOT by Hy Peskin

DOVIMA WITH ELEPHANTS by Richard Avedon

GUERRILLERO HEROICO by Alberto Korda

CASE STUDY HOUSE NO. 22, LOS ANGELES by Julius Shulman

NUIT DE NOËL (HAPPY CLUB) by Malick Sidibé

THE PILLOW FIGHT by Harry Benson

MUHAMMAD ALI VS. SONNY LISTON by Neil Leifer

CHAIRMAN MAO SWIMS IN THE YANGTZE by Unknown

BLACK POWER SALUTE by John Dominis

ALBINO BOY, BIAFRA by Don McCullin

WINDBLOWN JACKIE by Ron Galella

ALLENDE’S LAST STAND by Luis Orlando Lagos

MOLOTOV MAN by Susan Meiselas

MICHAEL JORDAN by Co Rentmeester

THE FACE OF AIDS by Therese Frare

DEMI MOORE by Annie Leibovitz

EVIDENCE

CATHEDRAL ROCK, YOSEMITE by Carleton Watkins

THE DEAD OF ANTIETAM by Alexander Gardner

THE VANISHING RACE by Edward S. Curtis

THE STEERAGE by Alfred Stieglitz

GIRL WORKER IN CAROLINA COTTON MILL by Lewis Hine

ROMANOV EXECUTION by Unknown

HITLER AT A NAZI PARTY RALLY by Heinrich Hoffmann

THE HINDENBURG DISASTER by Sam Shere

BLOODY SATURDAY by H.S. Wong

GRIEF by Dmitri Baltermants

JEWISH BOY SURRENDERS IN WARSAW by Unknown

THE CRITIC by Weegee

D-DAY by Robert Capa

MUSHROOM CLOUD OVER NAGASAKI by Lieutenant Charles Levy

EMMETT TILL by David Jackson

LEAP INTO FREEDOM by Peter Leibing

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA by Charles Moore

THE BURNING MONK by Malcolm Browne

JFK ASSASSINATION, FRAME 313 by Abraham Zapruder

SAIGON EXECUTION by Eddie Adams

INVASION OF PRAGUE by Josef Koudelka

A MAN ON THE MOON by Neil Armstrong, NASA

KENT STATE SHOOTINGS by John Paul Filo

THE TERROR OF WAR by Nick Ut

MUNICH MASSACRE by Kurt Strumpf

FIRE ESCAPE COLLAPSE by Stanley Forman

SOWETO UPRISING by Sam Nzima

BOAT OF NO SMILES by Eddie Adams

FIRING SQUAD IN IRAN by Jahangir Razmi

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS by Donna Ferrato

TANK MAN by Jeff Widener

BOSNIA by Ron Haviv

FAMINE IN SOMALIA by James Nachtwey

STARVING CHILD AND VULTURE by Kevin Carter

SURFING HIPPOS by Michael Nichols

FALLING MAN by Richard Drew

THE HOODED MAN by Sergeant Ivan Frederick

COFFIN BAN by Tami Silicio

IRAQI GIRL AT CHECKPOINT by Chris Hondros

GORILLA IN THE CONGO by Brent Stirton

THE SITUATION ROOM by Pete Souza

INNOVATION

VIEW FROM THE WINDOW AT LES GRAS by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE by Louis Daguerre

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH by Roger Fenton

THE HORSE IN MOTION by Eadweard Muybridge

BANDIT’S ROOST, 59½ MULBERRY STREET by Jacob Riis

THE HAND OF MRS. WILHELM RÖNTGEN by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

MOONLIGHT: THE POND by Edward Steichen

BLIND by Paul Strand

BRICKLAYER by August Sander

THE HAGUE by Erich Salomon

BEHIND THE GARE SAINT-LAZARE by Henri Cartier-Bresson

THE LOCH NESS MONSTER by Unknown

THE FALLING SOLDIER by Robert Capa

DALÍ ATOMICUS by Philippe Halsman

TROLLEY—NEW ORLEANS by Robert Frank

MILK DROP CORONET by Harold Edgerton

FETUS, 18 WEEKS by Lennart Nilsson

EARTHRISE by William Anders, NASA

UNTITLED FILM STILL #21 by Cindy Sherman

BRIAN RIDLEY AND LYLE HEETER by Robert Mapplethorpe

ANDROGYNY (6 MEN + 6 WOMEN) by Nancy Burson

IMMERSIONS (PISS CHRIST) by Andres Serrano

UNTITLED (COWBOY) by Richard Prince

PILLARS OF CREATION by NASA

FIRST CELL-PHONE PICTURE by Philippe Kahn

99 CENT by Andreas Gursky

THE DEATH OF NEDA by Unknown

NORTH KOREA by David Guttenfelder

OSCARS SELFIE by Bradley Cooper

AFTERWORD by David Von Drehle

CREDITS
Nine of Robert Capa’s surviving negatives from D-Day. Most of the film showed
no images after processing, and only some frames survived.
DEFINING INFLUENCE
By Ben Goldberger, Paul Moakley and Kira Pollack

We began this project with what seemed like a straightforward

idea: assemble a list of the 100 most influential photographs ever taken. If a
picture led to something important, it would be considered for inclusion. From
that simple concept flowed countless decisions. Though photography is a much
younger medium than painting—the first photo is widely considered to date
from 1826—the astonishing technological advances since then mean that there
are now far more pictures taken every day than there are canvases in all the
world’s galleries and museums. In 2014 alone, hundreds of billions of images
were made.
How do you narrow a pool that large? You start by calling in the experts. We
reached out to curators, historians and photo editors around the world for
suggestions. Their thoughtful nominations whittled the field, and then we asked
TIME reporters and editors to see if those held up to scrutiny. That meant
conducting thousands of interviews with the photographers, picture subjects,
their friends and family members and others, anywhere the rabbit holes led. It
was an exhaustive process that unearthed some incredible stories that we are
proud to tell for the first time.
Mathew Brady’s 1860 portrait of Abraham Lincoln as seen on a campaign carte
de visite.
Jeff Widener’s Tank Man photograph on the front page of the June 6, 1989, New
York Times.

There is no formula that makes a picture influential. Some images are on our
list because they were the first of their kind, others because they shaped the way
we think. And some made the cut because they directly changed the way we live.
What all 100 share is that they are turning points in our human experience.
A list about influence necessarily leaves off its fair share of iconic pictures
and important photographers. A survey class in great photographers would
surely include Ansel Adams and Walker Evans. And yet no single one of the
pictures Adams took inside Yosemite—majestic as they are—could rival in
influence Carleton Watkins’ work, which actually led to the creation of the park.
Similarly, no one of Evans’ deservedly celebrated pictures from the Depression
conveyed the human toll of that dark period with the immediate force of
Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.
Photography was born of a great innovation and is constantly reshaped by
new ones. So it is fitting that our definition of an influential photo changes along
with the ways pictures are taken and seen. There were other photographers who
captured the man confronting a column of People’s Liberation Army tanks
during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. But only Jeff Widener’s picture
of “Tank Man” was sent out over the wire of the Associated Press. For almost
seven decades, that wire was the most powerful distribution tool in photography,
offering the fastest route to the largest audience. It is possible that even such an
astounding image as the one Eddie Adams took of an execution in Saigon—a
masterwork that distilled the futile horror of the Vietnam War into a single frame
—might not have become iconic had it not been launched far and wide by the
AP.
Stills from Abraham Zapruder’s film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination pictured
in the November 29, 1963, issue of LIFE.
The July 23, 1964, issue of Jet magazine featuring David Jackson’s photographs
of Emmett Till.
 Led Zeppelin used Sam Shere’s photograph of the Hindenburg disaster on the
cover of its debut album.

In other cases, it was the appearance on the cover of a magazine or the front
page of a newspaper that lent a photo its influence. The first time the world saw
Abraham Zapruder’s haunting images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was
not as a moving picture but as a series of frame-by-frame stills published in
LIFE magazine. Before televisions were in every home, the photos that ran in
LIFE influenced how a lot of people understood their world. But LIFE was far
from alone. In 1955, Jet magazine published pictures from the open-casket
funeral of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American murdered for
supposedly flirting with a white woman in Mississippi. The photo of Till’s
mother grieving over her son’s mutilated body became a clarion call for the
nascent civil rights movement.
A far lighter image reminds us that an influential picture is not necessarily a
great one. Annie Leibovitz’s 1991 photo of a nude, pregnant Demi Moore
shattered the taboo of sexualizing pregnancy because it was on the cover of
Vanity Fair, not because it was an important portrait. As Leibovitz herself put it,
“It was a popular picture and it broke ground, but I don’t think it’s a good
photograph per se. It’s a magazine cover. If it were a great portrait, she wouldn’t
be covering her breasts. She wouldn’t necessarily be looking at the camera.”
The impact of those moments has dwindled amid yet another technological
change. When Philippe Kahn rigged his cell phone to take a picture of his
newborn daughter nearly 20 years ago, he could scarcely imagine that his
invention would change the world. Of course, now everyone is a photographer, a
publisher and a consumer. This has largely been to the good. Our connection
with photography is more personal and immediate than ever—that it took several
days and multiple plane flights for Robert Capa’s pictures of the D-Day landings
to see the light of day seems impossible when today our feeds are bursting with
images from every corner of the globe. But the digital revolution has made
quantifying influence a particular challenge. Likes and shares are a very real
metric, but are they enough? And what of a picture that was never published in
any traditional way? Unless you are in viral marketing, there is nothing to
admire in the poorly framed, celebrity-packed Oscars selfie organized by Ellen
DeGeneres. Yet the picture’s astounding reach through social media makes it one
of the most seen images of all time. Perhaps only Richard Prince, whose
“rephotography” anticipated this moment of instant sharing and mutable
ownership, could have seen it coming.
Annie Leibovitz’s Demi Moore on the cover of the August 1991 issue of Vanity
Fair.
 The Marlboro ad that became the basis of Richard Prince’s controversial
Untitled (Cowboy).

But not all things change. In the process of putting this list together, we
noticed that one aspect of influence has largely remained constant throughout
photography’s more than 175 years. The photographer has to be there. The best
photography is a form of bearing witness, a way of bringing a single vision to
the larger world. That was as true for Alexander Gardner when he took his
horse-pulled darkroom to the Battle of Antietam in 1862 as it was for David
Guttenfelder when he was the first professional photographer to post directly to
Instagram from inside North Korea in 2013. As James Nachtwey, who has
dedicated his life to being there, put it some years ago, “You keep on going, keep
on sending the pictures, because they can create an atmosphere where change is
possible. I always hang on to that.”

Goldberger, TIME’s nation editor; Moakley, TIME’s deputy director of

photography and visual enterprise; and Pollack, TIME’s director of photography
and visual enterprise are the editors of the 100 Photographs project.
 The first photograph, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, is sealed in an oxygen-free
case at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. Photograph by Jeff Wilson for TIME
PROOF OF LIFE
Geoff Dyer

It is quite an experience to go to the Ransom Center in Austin and

see the first known photograph. Niépce’s picture is housed in what looks like a
bulletproof case, the kind of structure associated with delicate religious artifacts
of which, it could be argued, this is a prime example. As well as seeming
bulletproof, the case, unfortunately, seems very nearly lightproof. So a
technology that enabled people to draw with light is preserved here in near
darkness. Before your eyes adjust and until you work out the proper angle from
which to view this view from a window, you can see almost nothing. Then a few
shapes dimly and gradually appear in a way that echoes what, until recently, was
one of the defining pleasures of the medium: the slow emergence of an image in
the developing tray. Still, the truth is that as a photograph—as a record of a view
from a window—you’re probably better off looking at the reproduction in this
book than peering at the on-site original. Which is also appropriate, since what
characterizes the photograph is its inherent reproducibility.
This is worth emphasizing, since the medium’s influence is bound up with
the means by which images are disseminated. Photography has always depended
on accompanying technological advances in communications whose goals,
broadly speaking, have been twofold: speed and extent of distribution. The
number of people who see a given image and the time it takes for them to see it
can be as important as its content in determining a picture’s potential influence.
Even art photographs have to appear at a timely moment if they are to acquire
the mythic stature of “timeless.” In the realm of news, important political
announcements—which increasingly take the form of photo opportunities—will
be arranged so that they fit in with certain deadlines (or, if the news is bad, so
that those deadlines are deliberately missed). The history of the technologies
associated with photography have involved the constant shrinking of the interval
between a picture’s being taken and its being seen until, at present, there is no
gap at all. We can see pictorial records of events in real time, but the price paid
for this is that the related technologies also enable the record to be falsified with
unprecedented speed and subtlety.
View From the Window at Le Gras, circa 1826 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
 The First Cell-Phone Picture, 1997 Philippe Kahn

This eats at the very meaning of photography. Critics with a taste for
philosophy nag away at questions of what “reality” is, but most important
commentators accept that photography is “a quotation” from reality (Susan
Sontag, John Berger), “a certificate of presence” (Roland Barthes), that it has an
indexical relationship to the world. John Szarkowski, former head of
photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was more specific
when he wrote of “photography’s central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the
precise and lucid description of significant fact.”
And that, to go back to the beginning, is the religion of which the artifact at
the Ransom Center is a foundational document. Photography upholds the belief
in verifiable reality. The late Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths put it
succinctly: “George Bernard Shaw said he would willingly exchange every
single painting of Christ for one snapshot. That is what photography has got
going for it.”
 The Horse in Motion, 1878 Eadweard Muybridge

Things can be proved to have happened, to have existed and therefore, by

implication, to have disappeared or ceased to exist. Photographs can be
manipulated, but examples of manipulation—the removal of Trotsky from
Russian history—also tacitly affirm that we go to photography for proof. The
mission of photography is enhanced by attempts to subvert any particular
instance of it.
It is unlikely that a selection of influential photographs could ever be
definitive, but consider the present choices in the light of a number of thought
experiments or exercises. Consider what might, in this context, be called the
negative version of the present crop of pictures. Imagine both world history and
the history of photography without these instances and records: it would be like
reading a book in which only material close to the edges, to the gutters and
margins, had been preserved.
The other two tests are specific to what is here. First, pick a couple of
photographs, study them without consulting the accompanying texts—or books
or the Internet—and compose your own captions. Write out, either actually or
mentally, what each picture depicts and shows. The surprising thing, I suspect, is
how vague your account will be. We are used to outsourcing our knowledge and
memory, of using Google to check things. But even prior to this, our visual
memories being stronger than those for numbers or words, we relied on pictures
to serve as metonyms of events. Our history of the world is not substantiated by
photographs; it is photographic. If everyone knows about the Great Depression
in America in the 1930s, that is partly because it was systematically documented
by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and a veritable legion of influential
photographers. By the same token, because there were almost no photographs to
document it, the contemporaneous and even more catastrophic famine in
Ukraine is largely a blank space in the collective memory. Relatedly, certain
photographs are influential precisely because they are not seen. Ken Burns’
masterly PBS series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History details the lengths to
which Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers went to ensure that no photographs
showed how thoroughly his mobility had been impaired by polio. It was no
secret that he had suffered from the disease—his ability to overcome its
debilitating effects was one of his strengths—but the President had to be seen to
be vigorous, and no evidence could be permitted to undermine this.
Migrant Mother, 1936 Dorothea Lange
 Kent State Shootings, 1970 John Paul Filo

The mirror image of this exercise is to pick an event or story—the shooting

at Kent State, say—and reconstruct the photo with which that story is associated,
building the photograph from the caption. The results would be the reverse of
those where we had struggled to conjure words from image: we can mentally
summon up the photo quite easily and accurately. The process is the opposite,
but the result is the same: to show how knowledge is photographic.
It would be too limiting, however, to assess the influence of photography
solely within the realm of the pictorial, the documentary—or even the aesthetic.
With wild prescience, D.H. Lawrence outlined what he saw as the psychic or
ontological consequences of photography in a 1925 essay, “Art and Morality”:
“As vision developed towards the Kodak, man’s idea of himself developed
towards the snapshot. Primitive man simply didn’t know what he was: he was
always half in the dark. But we have learned to see, and each of us has a
complete Kodak idea of himself.”
 Oscars Selfie, 2014 Bradley Cooper

By these terms, the selfie, and the attendant contemporary compulsion to

photograph oneself doing everything, is merely the latest technological iteration
of a habit of seeing and being that was, Lawrence claimed, “already old” at the
time of writing.
Half a century after Lawrence, Barthes became fascinated by “the
phenomenon of photography in its absolute novelty in world history.” Its
invention, he claimed in Camera Lucida, represented nothing less than “the
advent of myself as other.” Whether one’s preference is for the ill-tempered
English novelist or the suave Parisian theorist, the outcome of their
investigations is similar. Photography is more than a medium, more than a means
of storing knowledge, recording history or creating beauty. It has determined—
permanently imprinted itself—on what it means to be human.

Dyer’s books include The Ongoing Moment, winner of an Infinity Award, for
writing on photography, from the International Center of Photography.
 ICONS
One September day in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the PR
team for one of the world’s wealthiest clans set out to fan excitement for the
family’s latest project: Rockefeller Center, some 6 million square feet of
skyscraper space built on 22 acres in the heart of Manhattan. The team took a lot
of photos that day, but only one became iconic. It showed 11 men sitting casually
on a girder 800 feet above the pavement. They chat, scan newspapers, cadge a
light, all while dangling their feet in an ocean of thin air. Lunch Atop a
Skyscraper suggests the peril that yawned in 1932, when America, and the
world, dangled over an abyss. And it contains the crazy confidence of a nation
that knew the gravest danger was fear itself.
Iconic photographs lodge first in the viscera, then move to the brain to
unpack their meanings. Nat Fein’s forlorn image of Babe Ruth’s last appearance
in Yankee Stadium, his luster eclipsed by time and cancer, contains all there is to
know about the paths of glory. When James VanDerZee’s picture of black New
Yorkers in furs was discovered in 1969, it reanimated the Harlem Renaissance in
a way no shelf of books could do. The catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic can be
felt in a glimpse of Therese Frare’s picture of David Kirby on his deathbed.
A photograph is, in a sense, the fossil version of light, a kind of time machine
bringing a moment of the past forward while ferrying the present into the past.
Iconic photographs, like those of the fossils of Olduvai Gorge, record more than
a jawbone or a footprint. They suggest a world.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN | Mathew Brady, 1860

‘I had great trouble in making a natural picture.’ –MATHEW BRADY

Abraham Lincoln was a little-known one-term Illinois Congressman with

national aspirations when he arrived in New York City in February 1860 to
speak at the Cooper Union. The speech had to be perfect, but Lincoln also knew
the importance of image. Before taking to the podium, he stopped at the
Broadway photography studio of Mathew B. Brady. The portraitist, who had
photographed everyone from Edgar Allan Poe to James Fenimore Cooper and
would chronicle the coming Civil War, knew a thing or two about presentation.
He set the gangly rail splitter in a statesmanlike pose, tightened his shirt collar to
hide his long neck and retouched the image to improve his looks. In a click of a
shutter, Brady dispelled talk of what Lincoln said were “rumors of my long
ungainly figure … making me into a man of human aspect and dignified
bearing.” By capturing Lincoln’s youthful features before the ravages of the
Civil War would etch his face with the strains of the Oval Office, Brady
presented him as a calm contender in the fractious antebellum era. Lincoln’s
subsequent talk before a largely Republican audience of 1,500 was a resounding
success, and Brady’s picture soon appeared in publications like Harper’s Weekly
and on cartes de visite and election posters and buttons, making it the most
powerful early instance of a photo used as campaign propaganda. As the portrait
spread, it propelled Lincoln from the edge of greatness to the White House,
where he preserved the Union and ended slavery. As Lincoln later admitted,
“Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me President of the United States.”
LUNCH ATOP A SKYSCRAPER | Unknown, 1932

‘If you see this picture once, you never forget it.’ –CHRISTINE ROUSSEL,
ROCKEFELLER CENTER HISTORIAN

It’s the most perilous yet playful lunch break ever captured: 11 men casually
eating, chatting and sneaking a smoke as if they weren’t 840 feet above
Manhattan with nothing but a thin beam keeping them aloft. That comfort is real;
the men are among the construction workers who helped build Rockefeller
Center. But the picture, taken on the 69th floor of the flagship RCA Building
(now the GE Building), was staged as part of a promotional campaign for the
massive skyscraper complex. While the photographer and the identities of most
of the subjects remain a mystery—the photographers Charles C. Ebbets, Thomas
Kelley and William Leftwich were all present that day, and it’s not known which
one took it—there isn’t an ironworker in New York City who doesn’t see the
picture as a badge of their bold tribe. In that way they are not alone. By
thumbing its nose at both danger and the Depression, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
came to symbolize American resilience and ambition at a time when both were
desperately needed. It has since become an iconic emblem of the city in which it
was taken, affirming the romantic belief that New York is a place unafraid to
tackle projects that would cow less brazen cities. And like all symbols in a city
built on hustle, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper has spawned its own economy. It is the
Corbis photo agency’s most reproduced image. And good luck walking through
Times Square without someone hawking it on a mug, magnet or T-shirt.
COUPLE IN RACCOON COATS | James VanDerZee, 1932

‘I always wanted people to look good, to look the way they wanted to look.’
–JAMES VANDERZEE

To many white Americans in the 1930s, black people were little more than
domestics or sharecroppers. They were ignored, invisible, forgotten. But that
was not what James VanDerZee saw when he gazed through his camera lens.
Seeking to counter the degrading and widely disseminated caricatures of African
Americans in popular culture, VanDerZee not only photographed Harlem
weddings, funerals, clubs and families but also chronicled the likes of black
nationalist Marcus Garvey, dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the poet
Countee Cullen—the leaders, artists, writers, movers and strivers of the Harlem
Renaissance. In his Guarantee Photo Studio and along the neighborhood’s
streets, VanDerZee crafted portraits that were meticulously staged to celebrate
the images his subjects wanted to project. And nowhere is this pride more
evident than in his glowing picture of a handsome couple sporting raccoon coats
beside a Cadillac roadster. The swish backdrop—props curated by VanDerZee—
challenged popular perceptions about race, class and success and became an
aspirational model for generations of African Americans yearning for a full
piece of the American Dream.
MIGRANT MOTHER | Dorothea Lange, 1936

‘You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal.’ –ROY STRYKER, FARM
SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

The picture that did more than any other to humanize the cost of the Great
Depression almost didn’t happen. Driving past the crude “Pea-Pickers Camp”
sign in Nipomo, north of Los Angeles, Dorothea Lange kept going for 20 miles.
But something nagged at the photographer from the government’s Resettlement
Administration, and she finally turned around. At the camp, the Hoboken, N.J.–
born Lange spotted Frances Owens Thompson and knew she was in the right
place. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother in the sparse
lean-to tent, as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange later wrote. The farm’s crop had
frozen, and there was no work for the homeless pickers, so the 32-year-old
Thompson sold the tires from her car to buy food, which was supplemented with
birds killed by the children. Lange, who believed that one could understand
others through close study, tightly framed the children and the mother, whose
eyes, worn from worry and resignation, look past the camera. Lange took six
photos with her 4x5 Graflex camera, later writing, “I knew I had recorded the
essence of my assignment.” Afterward Lange informed the authorities of the
plight of those at the encampment, and they sent 20,000 pounds of food. Of the
160,000 images taken by Lange and other photographers for the Resettlement
Administration, Migrant Mother has become the most iconic picture of the
Depression. Through an intimate portrait of the toll being exacted across the
land, Lange gave a face to a suffering nation.
FORT PECK DAM | Margaret Bourke-White, 1936

‘To see, and to show, is the mission now undertaken by LIFE.’ –HENRY R. LUCE

It was to quickly become the most influential news and photography magazine
of its time, and LIFE’s November 1936 debut issue proudly announced that it
would cover stories of enormous scope and complexity in a uniquely visual way.
What better person, thought publisher Henry Luce, than his FORTUNE magazine
photographer Margaret Bourke-White to shoot LIFE’s premier story, on the
construction of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam? There, on the cover with the castle-
like structure and a photo essay inside, Bourke-White used pictures to give a
human feel to an article on the world’s largest earth-filled dam. She did this by
focusing not only on the technical challenges of the massive New Deal project in
the Missouri River Basin but also on the Wild West vibe in “the whole
ramshackle town,” a place “stuffed to the seams with construction men,
engineers, welders, quack doctors, barmaids, fancy ladies.” Bourke-White’s
cover became the defining image of the magazine that helped define a style of
photojournalism and set the tone for the other great LIFE photographers who
followed her. As her colleague Carl Mydans, the great war photojournalist, put
it, Bourke-White’s influence “was incalculable.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL | Yousuf Karsh, 1941

‘The strength and power of Churchill’s face stiffened the resolution of the
English people.’ –PETER POLLACK, HISTORIAN

Britain stood alone in 1941. By then Poland, France and large parts of Europe
had fallen to the Nazi forces, and it was only the tiny nation’s pilots, soldiers and
sailors, along with those of the Commonwealth, who kept the darkness at bay.
Winston Churchill was determined that the light of England would continue to
shine. In December 1941, soon after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and
America was pulled into the war, Churchill visited Parliament in Ottawa to thank
Canada and the Allies for their help. Churchill wasn’t aware that Yousuf Karsh
had been tasked to take his portrait afterward, and when he came out and saw the
Turkish-born Canadian photographer, he demanded to know, “Why was I not
told?” Churchill then lit a cigar, puffed at it and said to the photographer, “You
may take one.” As Karsh prepared, Churchill refused to put down the cigar. So
once Karsh made sure all was ready, he walked over to the Prime Minister and
said, “Forgive me, sir,” and plucked the cigar out of Churchill’s mouth. “By the
time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent, he could have devoured
me. It was at that instant that I took the photograph.” Ever the diplomat,
Churchill then smiled and said, “You may take another one” and shook Karsh’s
hand, telling him, “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be
photographed.”
The result of Karsh’s lion taming is one of the most widely reproduced
images in history and a watershed in the art of political portraiture. It was
Karsh’s picture of the bulldoggish Churchill—published first in the American
daily PM and eventually on the cover of LIFE—that gave modern photographers
permission to make honest, even critical portrayals of our leaders.
AMERICAN GOTHIC | Gordon Parks, 1942

‘I didn’t care about what anybody else felt. That’s what I felt about America and
Ella Watson’s position inside America.’ –GORDON PARKS

As the 15th child of black Kansas sharecroppers, Gordon Parks knew poverty.
But he didn’t experience virulent racism until he arrived in Washington in 1942
for a fellowship at the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Parks, who would
go on to became the first African-American photographer at LIFE, was stunned.
“White restaurants made me enter through the back door. White theaters
wouldn’t even let me in the door,” he recalled. Refusing to be cowed, Parks
searched out older African Americans to document how they dealt with such
daily indignities and came across Ella Watson, who worked in the FSA’s
building. She told him of her life of struggle, of a father murdered by a lynch
mob, of a husband shot to death. He photographed Watson as she went about her
day, culminating in his American Gothic, a clear parody of Grant Wood’s iconic
1930 oil painting. It served as an indictment of the treatment of African
Americans by accentuating the inequality in “the land of the free” and came to
symbolize life in pre-civil-rights America. “What the camera had to do was
expose the evils of racism,” Parks later observed, “by showing the people who
suffered most under it.”
BETTY GRABLE | Frank Powolny, 1943

‘On every pilot’s plane, on every barrack’s wall, there was a picture of Betty
Grable in a bathing suit looking over her shoulder.’ –MATT HELRICH, WORLD WAR II
VETERAN

Helen of Troy, the mythic Greek demigod who sparked the Trojan War and
“launch’d a thousand ships,” had nothing on Betty Grable of St. Louis. For that
platinum blond, blue-eyed Hollywood starlet had a set of gams that inspired
American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to set forth to save civilization
from the Axis powers. And unlike Helen, Betty represented the flesh-and-blood
“girl back home,” patiently keeping the fires burning. Frank Powolny brought
Betty to the troops by accident. A photographer for 20th Century Fox, he was
taking publicity pictures of the actress for the 1943 film Sweet Rosie O’Grady
when she agreed to a “back shot.” The studio turned the coy pose into one of the
earliest pinups, and soon troops were requesting 50,000 copies every month. The
men took Betty wherever they went, tacking her poster to barrack walls, painting
her on bomber fuselages and fastening 2-by-3 prints of her next to their hearts.
Before Marilyn Monroe, Betty’s smile and legs—said to be insured for a million
bucks with Lloyd’s of London—rallied countless homesick young men in the
fight of their lives (including a young Hugh Hefner, who cited her as an
inspiration for Playboy). “I’ve got to be an enlisted man’s girl,” said Grable, who
signed hundreds of her pinups each month during the war. “Just like this has got
to be an enlisted man’s war.”
FLAG RAISING ON IWO JIMA | Joe Rosenthal, 1945

‘The picture delivered the message that Americans wanted to hear.’ –HAL BUELL,
AP PHOTO EDITOR

It is but a speck of an island 760 miles south of Tokyo, a volcanic pile that
blocked the Allies’ march toward Japan. The Americans needed Iwo Jima as an
air base, but the Japanese had dug in. U.S. troops landed on February 19, 1945,
beginning a month of fighting that claimed the lives of 6,800 Americans and
21,000 Japanese. On the fifth day of battle, the Marines captured Mount
Suribachi. An American flag was quickly raised, but a commander called for a
bigger one, in part to inspire his men and demoralize his opponents. Associated
Press photographer Joe Rosenthal lugged his bulky Speed Graphic camera to the
top, and as five Marines and a Navy corpsman prepared to hoist the Stars and
Stripes, Rosenthal stepped back to get a better frame—and almost missed the
shot. “The sky was overcast,” he later wrote of what has become one of the most
recognizable images of war. “The wind just whipped the flag out over the heads
of the group, and at their feet the disrupted terrain and the broken stalks of the
shrubbery exemplified the turbulence of war.” Two days later Rosenthal’s photo
was splashed on front pages across the U.S., where it was quickly embraced as a
symbol of unity in the long-fought war. The picture, which earned Rosenthal a
Pulitzer Prize, so resonated that it was made into a postage stamp and cast as a
100-ton bronze memorial.
RAISING A FLAG OVER THE REICHSTAG | Yevgeny Khaldei,
1945

‘Then I found my spot, and I told the soldier, “Alyosha, climb up there.” ’
–YEVGENY KHALDEI

“This is what I was waiting for for 1,400 days,” the Ukrainian-born Yevgeny
Khaldei said as he gazed at the ruins of Berlin on May 2, 1945. After four years
of fighting and photographing across Eastern Europe, the Red Army soldier
arrived in the heart of the Nazis’ homeland armed with his Leica III rangefinder
and a massive Soviet flag that his uncle, a tailor, had fashioned for him from
three red tablecloths. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide two days before, yet
the war still raged as Khaldei made his way to the Reichstag. There he told three
soldiers to join him, and they clambered up broken stairs onto the parliament
building’s blood-soaked parapet. Gazing through his camera, Khaldei knew he
had the shot he had hoped for: “I was euphoric.” In printing, Khaldei dramatized
the image by intensifying the smoke and darkening the sky—even scratching out
part of the negative—to craft a romanticized scene that was part reality, part
artifice and all patriotism. Published in the Russian magazine Ogonek, the image
became an instant propaganda icon. And no wonder. The flag jutting from the
heart of the enemy exalted the nobility of communism, proclaimed the Soviets
the new overlords and hinted that by lowering the curtain of war, Premier Joseph
Stalin would soon hoist a cold new iron one across the land.
V-J DAY IN TIMES SQUARE | Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1945

‘Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around
and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse.’ –ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

At its best, photography captures fleeting snippets that crystallize the hope,
anguish, wonder and joy of life. Alfred Eisenstaedt, one of the first four
photographers hired by LIFE magazine, made it his mission “to find and catch the
storytelling moment.” He didn’t have to go far for it when World War II ended
on August 14, 1945. Taking in the mood on the streets of New York City,
Eisenstaedt soon found himself in the joyous tumult of Times Square. As he
searched for subjects, a sailor in front of him grabbed hold of a nurse, tilted her
back and kissed her. Eisenstaedt’s photograph of that passionate swoop distilled
the relief and promise of that momentous day in a single moment of unbridled
joy (although some argue today that it should be seen as a case of sexual
assault). His beautiful image has become the most famous and frequently
reproduced picture of the 20th century, and it forms the basis of our collective
memory of that transformative moment in world history. “People tell me that
when I’m in heaven,” Eisenstaedt said, “they will remember this picture.”
GANDHI AND THE SPINNING WHEEL | Margaret Bourke-White,
1946

‘Nonviolence was Gandhi’s creed, and the spinning wheel was the perfect
weapon.’ –MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

When the British held Mohandas Gandhi prisoner at Yeravda prison in Pune,
India, from 1932 to 1933, the nationalist leader made his own thread with a
charkha, a portable spinning wheel. The practice evolved from a source of
personal comfort during captivity into a touchstone of the campaign for
independence, with Gandhi encouraging his countrymen to make their own
homespun cloth instead of buying British goods. By the time Margaret Bourke-
White came to Gandhi’s compound for a LIFE article on India’s leaders, spinning
was so bound up with Gandhi’s identity that his secretary, Pyarelal Nayyar, told
Bourke-White that she had to learn the craft before photographing the leader.
Bourke-White’s picture of Gandhi reading the news alongside his charkha never
appeared in the article for which it was taken, but less than two years later LIFE
featured the photo prominently in a tribute published after Gandhi’s
assassination. It soon became an indelible image, the slain civil-disobedience
crusader with his most potent symbol, and helped solidify the perception of
Gandhi outside the subcontinent as a saintly man of peace.
THE BABE BOWS OUT | Nat Fein, 1948

‘If I didn’t know that the Babe’s uniform was being retired, it would have never
occurred to me to go in the back of him.’ –NAT FEIN

He was the greatest ballplayer of them all, the towering Sultan of Swat. But by
1948, Babe Ruth had been out of the game for more than a decade and was
struggling with terminal cancer. So when the beloved Bambino stood before a
massive crowd on June 13 to help celebrate the silver anniversary of Yankee
Stadium—known to all in attendance as the House That Ruth Built—and to
retire his No. 3, it was clear this was a final public goodbye.
Nat Fein of the New York Herald Tribune was one of dozens of
photographers staked out along the first-base line. But as the sound of “Auld
Lang Syne” filled the stadium, Fein “got a feeling” and walked behind Ruth,
where he saw the proud ballplayer leaning on a bat, his thin legs hinting at the
toll the disease had wreaked on his body. From that spot, Fein captured the
almost mythic role that athletes play in our lives—even at their weakest, they
loom large. Two months later Ruth was dead, and Fein went on to win a Pulitzer
Prize for his picture. It was the first one awarded to a sports photographer, giving
critical legitimacy to a form other than hard-news reportage.
COUNTRY DOCTOR | W. Eugene Smith, 1948

‘I spent four weeks living with him. I made very few pictures at first. I mainly
tried to learn what made the doctor tick.’ –W. EUGENE SMITH

Although lauded for his war photography, W. Eugene Smith left his most
enduring mark with a series of midcentury photo essays for LIFE magazine. The
Wichita, Kans.–born photographer spent weeks immersing himself in his
subjects’ lives, from a South Carolina nurse-midwife to the residents of a
Spanish village. His aim was to see the world from the perspective of his
subjects—and to compel viewers to do the same. “I do not seek to possess my
subject but rather to give myself to it,” he said of his approach. Nowhere was
this clearer than in his landmark photo essay “Country Doctor.” Smith spent 23
days with Dr. Ernest Ceriani in and around Kremmling, Colo., trailing the hardy
physician through the ranching community of 2,000 souls beneath the Rocky
Mountains. He watched him tend to infants, deliver injections in the backseats of
cars, develop his own x-rays, treat a man with a heart attack and then phone a
priest to give last rites. By digging so deeply into his assignment, Smith created
a singular, starkly intimate glimpse into the life of a remarkable man. It became
not only the most influential photo essay in history but the aspirational template
for the form.
CAMELOT | Hy Peskin, 1953

‘He became emblematic of a new breed of celebrity politician, as notable for his
good looks, infectious smile, charm and wit as for his thoughtful
pronouncements.’ –ROBERT DALLEK, HISTORIAN

Before they could become American royalty, America needed to meet John
Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. That introduction came when
Hy Peskin photographed the handsome politician on the make and his radiant
fiancée over a summer weekend in 1953. Peskin, a renowned sports
photographer, headed to Hyannis Port, Mass., at the invitation of family
patriarch Joseph Kennedy. The ambassador, eager for his son to take the stage as
a national figure, thought a feature in the pages of LIFE would foster a fascination
with John, his pretty girlfriend and one of America’s wealthiest families. That it
did. Peskin put together a somewhat contrived “behind the scenes” series titled
“Senator Kennedy Goes A-Courting.” While Jackie bristled at the intrusion—
John’s mother Rose even told her how to pose—she went along with the staging,
and readers got to observe Jackie mussing the hair of “the handsomest young
member of the U.S. Senate,” playing football and softball with her future in-
laws, and sailing aboard John’s boat, Victura. “They just shoved me into that
boat long enough to take the picture,” she later confided to a friend.
It was pitch-perfect brand making, with Kennedy on the cover of the world’s
most widely read photo magazine, cast as a self-assured playboy prepared to say
goodbye to bachelorhood. A few months later LIFE would cover the couple’s
wedding, and by then America was captivated. In the staid age of Dwight David
Eisenhower and Richard Milhous Nixon, Peskin unveiled the face of Camelot,
one that changed America’s perception of politics and politicians, and set John
and Jackie off on becoming the most recognizable couple on the planet.
DOVIMA WITH ELEPHANTS | Richard Avedon, Cirque d’Hiver,
Paris, August 1955

‘I saw the elephants under an enormous skylight and in a second I knew that I
then had to find the right dress, and I knew that there was potential here for a
kind of dream image.’ –RICHARD AVEDON

When Richard Avedon photographed Dovima at a Paris circus in 1955 for

Harper’s Bazaar, both were already prominent in their fields. She was one of the
world’s most famous models, and he was one of the most famous fashion
photographers. It makes sense, then, that Dovima With Elephants is one of the
most famous fashion photographs of all time. But its enduring influence lies as
much in what it captures as in the two people who made it. Dovima was one of
the last great models of the sophisticated mold, when haute couture was a
relatively cloistered and elite world. After the 1950s, models began to gravitate
toward girl-next-door looks instead of the old generation’s unattainable beauty,
helping turn high fashion into entertainment. Dovima With Elephants distills that
shift by juxtaposing the spectacle and strength of the elephants with Dovima’s
beauty—and the delicacy of her gown, which was the first Dior dress designed
by Yves Saint Laurent. The picture also brings movement to a medium that was
previously typified by stillness. Models had long been mannequins, meant to
stand still while the clothes got all the attention. Avedon saw what was wrong
with that equation: clothes didn’t just make the man; the man also made the
clothes. And by moving models out of the studio and placing them against
exciting backdrops, he helped blur the line between commercial fashion
photography and art. In that way, Dovima With Elephants captures a turning
point in our broader culture: the last old-style model, setting fashion off on its
new path.
GUERRILLERO HEROICO | Alberto Korda, 1960

‘It seems that there is not one socially conscious young person in the world who
does not believe that this man, Che, represents what they’d like to become.’
–ALBERTO KORDA

The day before Alberto Korda took his iconic photograph of Cuban
revolutionary Che Guevara, a ship had exploded in Havana Harbor, killing the
crew and dozens of dockworkers. Covering the funeral for the newspaper
Revolución, Korda focused on Fidel Castro, who in a fiery oration accused the
U.S. of causing the explosion. The two frames he shot of Castro’s young ally
were a seeming afterthought, and they went unpublished by the newspaper. But
after Guevara was killed leading a guerrilla movement in Bolivia nearly seven
years later, the Cuban regime embraced him as a martyr for the movement, and
Korda’s image of the beret-clad revolutionary soon became its most enduring
symbol. In short order, Guerrillero Heroico was appropriated by artists, causes
and admen around the world, appearing on everything from protest art to
underwear to soft drinks. It has become the cultural shorthand for rebellion and
one of the most recognizable and reproduced images of all time, with its
influence long since transcending its steely-eyed subject.
CASE STUDY HOUSE NO. 22, LOS ANGELES | Julius Shulman,
1960

‘This was the time when we were building rockets to go to the moon and we
were planning on colonizing Mars, and this sort of popular zeitgeist is caught
perfectly in that picture.’ –TOM FORD, DESIGNER

For decades, the California Dream meant the chance to own a stucco home on a
sliver of paradise. The point was the yard with the palm trees, not the contour of
the walls. Julius Shulman helped change all that. In May 1960, the Brooklyn-
born photographer headed to architect Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, a glass-
enclosed Hollywood Hills home with a breathtaking view of Los Angeles—one
of 36 Case Study Houses that were part of an architectural experiment extolling
the virtues of modernist theory and industrial materials. Shulman photographed
most of the houses in the project, helping demystify modernism by highlighting
its graceful simplicity and humanizing its angular edges. But none of his other
pictures was more influential than the one he took of Case Study House No. 22.
To show the essence of this air-breaking cantilevered building, Shulman set two
glamorous women in cocktail dresses inside the house, where they appear to be
floating above a mythic, twinkling city. The photo, which he called “one of my
masterpieces,” is the most successful real estate image ever taken. It perfected
the art of aspirational staging, turning a house into the embodiment of the Good
Life, of stardusted Hollywood, of California as the Promised Land. And, thanks
to Shulman, that dream now includes a glass box in the sky.
NUIT DE NOëL (HAPPY CLUB) | Malick Sidibé, 1963

‘Youth is about childlike games. Those moments which tell you there is no
suffering.’ –MALICK SIDIBÉ

Malian photographer Malick Sidibé’s life followed the trajectory of his nation.
He started out herding his family’s goats, then trained in jewelry making,
painting and photography. As French colonial rule ended in 1960, he captured
the subtle and profound changes reshaping his nation. Nicknamed the Eye of
Bamako, Sidibé took thousands of photos that became a real-time chronicle of
the euphoric zeitgeist gripping the capital, a document of a fleeting moment.
“Everyone had to have the latest Paris style,” he observed of young people
wearing flashy clothes, straddling Vespas and nuzzling in public as they
embraced a world without shackles. On Christmas Eve in 1963, Sidibé happened
on a young couple at a club, lost in each other’s eyes. What Sidibé called his
“talent to observe” allowed him to capture their quiet intimacy, heads brushing
as they grace an empty dance floor. “We were entering a new era, and people
wanted to dance,” Sidibé said. “Music freed us. Suddenly, young men could get
close to young women, hold them in their hands. Before, it was not allowed. And
everyone wanted to be photographed dancing up close.”
THE PILLOW FIGHT | Harry Benson, 1964

‘The Beatles will never have a pillow fight again, and I couldn’t repeat that
picture again.’ –HARRY BENSON

Harry Benson didn’t want to meet the Beatles. The Glasgow-born photographer
had plans to cover a news story in Africa when he was assigned to photograph
the musicians in Paris. “I took myself for a serious journalist and I didn’t want to
cover a rock ’n’ roll story,” he scoffed. But once he met the boys from Liverpool
and heard them play, Benson had no desire to leave. “I thought, ‘God, I’m on the
right story.’” The Beatles were on the cusp of greatness, and Benson was in the
middle of it. His pillow-fight photo, taken in the swanky George V Hotel the
night the band found out “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit No. 1 in the U.S.,
freezes John, Paul, George and Ringo in an exuberant cascade of boyish talent—
and perhaps their last moment of unbridled innocence. It captures the sheer joy,
happiness and optimism that would be embraced as Beatlemania and that helped
lift America’s morale just 11 weeks after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The
following month, Benson accompanied the Fab Four as they flew to New York
City to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, kick-starting the British Invasion. The
trip led to decades of collaboration with the group and, as Benson later recalled,
“I was so close to not being there.”
MUHAMMAD ALI VS. SONNY LISTON | Neil Leifer, 1965

‘As Ali got older, people wanted to remember him at his absolute best. People
wanted to remember him that way.’ –NEIL LEIFER

So much of great photography is being in the right spot at the right moment.
That was what it was like for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED photographer Neil Leifer when
he shot perhaps the greatest sports photo of the century. “I was obviously in the
right seat, but what matters is I didn’t miss,” he later said. Leifer had taken that
ringside spot in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, as 23-year-old heavyweight
boxing champion Muhammad Ali squared off against 34-year-old Sonny Liston,
the man he’d snatched the title from the previous year. One minute and 44
seconds into the first round, Ali’s right fist connected with Liston’s chin and
Liston went down. Leifer snapped the photo of the champ towering over his
vanquished opponent and taunting him, “Get up and fight, sucker!” Powerful
overhead lights and thick clouds of cigar smoke had turned the ring into the
perfect studio, and Leifer took full advantage. His perfectly composed image
captures Ali radiating the strength and poetic brashness that made him the
nation’s most beloved and reviled athlete, at a moment when sports, politics and
popular culture were being squarely battered in the tumult of the ’60s.
CHAIRMAN MAO SWIMS IN THE YANGTZE | Unknown, 1966

‘The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.’
–CHAIRMAN MAO ZEDONG

After decades leading the Chinese Communist Party and then his nation, Mao
Zedong began to worry about how he would be remembered. The 72-year-old
Chairman feared too that his legacy would be undermined by the stirrings of a
counterrevolution. And so in July 1966, with an eye toward securing his grip on
power, Mao took a dip in the Yangtze River to show the world that he was still in
robust health. It was a propaganda coup. The image of that swim, one of the few
widely circulated photos of the leader, did just what Mao hoped. Back in Beijing,
Mao launched his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, rallying the masses to
purge his rivals. His grip on power was tighter than ever. Mao enlisted the
nation’s young people and implored these rabid Red Guards to “dare to be
violent.” Insanity quickly descended on the land of 750 million, as troops
clutching the Chairman’s Little Red Book smashed relics and temples and
punished perceived traitors. When the Cultural Revolution finally petered out a
decade later, more than a million people had perished.
BLACK POWER SALUTE | John Dominis, 1968

‘We were trying to wake the country up and wake the world up too.’ –JOHN
CARLOS

The Olympics are intended to be a celebration of global unity. But when the
American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos ascended the medal stand at
the 1968 Games in Mexico City, they were determined to shatter the illusion that
all was right in the world. Just before “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play,
Smith, the gold medalist, and Carlos, the bronze winner, bowed their heads and
raised black-gloved fists in the air. Their message could not have been clearer:
Before we salute America, America must treat blacks as equal. “We knew that
what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat,” Carlos later
said. John Dominis, a quick-fingered LIFE photographer known for capturing
unexpected moments, shot a close-up that revealed another layer: Smith in black
socks, his running shoes off, in a gesture meant to symbolize black poverty.
Published in LIFE, Dominis’ image turned the somber protest into an iconic
emblem of the turbulent 1960s.
ALBINO BOY, BIAFRA | Don McCullin, 1969

‘This is one of the most obscene photographs I’ve ever taken.’ –DON MCCULLIN

Few remember Biafra, the tiny western African nation that split off from
southern Nigeria in 1967 and was retaken less than three years later. Much of the
world learned of the enormity of that brief struggle through images of the mass
starvation and disease that took the lives of possibly millions. None proved as
powerful as British war photographer Don McCullin’s picture of a 9-year-old
albino child. “To be a starving Biafran orphan was to be in a most pitiable
situation, but to be a starving albino Biafran was to be in a position beyond
description,” McCullin wrote. “Dying of starvation, he was still among his peers
an object of ostracism, ridicule and insult.” This photo profoundly influenced
public opinion, pressured governments to take action, and led to massive airlifts
of food, medicine and weapons. McCullin hoped that such stark images would
be able to “break the hearts and spirits of secure people.” While public attention
eventually shifted, McCullin’s work left a lasting legacy: he and other witnesses
of the conflict inspired the launch of Doctors Without Borders, which delivers
emergency medical support to those suffering from war, epidemics and disasters.
WINDBLOWN JACKIE | Ron Galella, 1971

‘On the corner, I did a brilliant thing. I took a taxi because you have to hide to
get the off-guard picture.’ –RON GALELLA

People simply could not get enough of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the
beautiful young widow of the slain President who married a fabulously wealthy
Greek shipping tycoon. She was a public figure with a tightly guarded private
life, which made her a prime target for the photographers who followed
wherever she went. And none was as devoted to capturing the former First Lady
as Ron Galella. One of the original freewheeling celebrity shooters, Galella
created the model for today’s paparazzi with a follow-and-ambush style that
ensnared everyone from Michael Jackson and Sophia Loren to Marlon Brando,
who so resented Galella’s attention that he knocked out five of the
photographer’s teeth. But Galella’s favorite subject was Jackie O., whom he shot
to the point of obsession. It was Galella’s relentless fixation that led him to hop
in a taxi and trail Onassis after he spotted her on New York City’s Upper East
Side in October 1971. The driver honked his horn, and Galella clicked his
shutter just as Onassis turned to look in his direction. “I don’t think she knew it
was me,” he recalled. “That’s why she smiled a little.” The picture, which
Galella proudly called “my Mona Lisa,” exudes the unguarded spontaneity that
marks a great celebrity photo. “It was the iconic photograph of the American
celebrity aristocracy, and it created a genre,” says the writer Michael Gross. The
image also tested the blurry line between newsgathering and a public figure’s
personal rights. Jackie, who resented the constant attention, twice dragged
Galella to court and eventually got him banned from photographing her family.
No shortage of others followed in his wake.
ALLENDE’S LAST STAND | Luis Orlando Lagos, 1973

‘With my life I will pay for defending the principles dear to our nation.’
–SALVADOR ALLENDE

Salvador Allende was the first democratically elected Marxist head of state, and
he assumed the presidency of Chile in 1970 with a mandate to transform the
country. He nationalized U.S.-owned companies, turned estates into
cooperatives, froze prices, increased wages and churned out money to bankroll
the changes. But the economy faltered, inflation soared, and unrest grew. In late
August 1973, Allende appointed Augusto Pinochet as commander of the army.
Eighteen days later, the conservative general orchestrated a coup. Allende
refused to leave. Armed with an AK-47 and protected only by loyal guards at his
side, he broadcast his final address on the radio, the sound of gunfire audible in
the background. As Santiago’s presidential palace was bombarded, Luis Orlando
Lagos, Allende’s official photographer, captured one of his final moments. Not
long after, Allende committed suicide—though for decades many believed he
was killed by the advancing troops. Fearing for his own life, Lagos fled. During
Pinochet’s nearly 17-year rule, 40,000 Chileans were interrogated, tortured,
killed or disappeared. Lagos’ picture appeared anonymously. It won the 1973
World Press Photo of the Year award and became revered as an image that
immortalized Allende as a hero who gladly chose death over dishonor. It was
only after Lagos’ death in 2007 that people learned the photographer’s identity.
MOLOTOV MAN | Susan Meiselas, 1979

‘Molotov Man kept appearing and reappearing, used by different players for
different purposes.’ –SUSAN MEISELAS

Susan Meiselas traveled to Nicaragua in the late 1970s as a young photographer

with an anthropologist’s eye, keen to make sense of the struggle between the
long-standing Somoza dictatorship and the socialist Sandinistas fighting to
overthrow it. For six weeks she roamed the country, documenting a nation of
grinding poverty, stunning natural beauty and wrenching inequality. Meiselas’
work was sympathetic to the Sandinista cause, and she gained the trust of the
revolutionaries as they slowly prevailed in the fight. On the day before President
Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled, Meiselas photographed Pablo de Jesus “Bareta”
Araúz lobbing a Molotov cocktail at one of the last national guard fortresses.
After the Sandinistas took power, the image became the defining symbol of the
revolution—a reviled dictator toppled by a ragtag army of denim-clad fighters
wielding makeshift weapons. Eagerly disseminated by the Sandinistas, Molotov
Man soon became ubiquitous throughout Nicaragua, appearing on matchbooks,
T-shirts, billboards and brochures. It later became a flash point in the debate over
artistic appropriation when the painter Joy Garnett used it as the basis of her
2003 painting Molotov.
MICHAEL JORDAN | Co Rentmeester, 1984

‘It’s gotta be the shoes.’ –NIKE COMMERCIAL, 1989

It may be the most famous silhouette ever photographed. Shooting Michael

Jordan for LIFE in 1984, Jacobus “Co” Rentmeester captured the basketball star
soaring through the air for a dunk, legs split like a ballet dancer’s and left arm
stretched to the stars. A beautiful image, but one unlikely to have endured had
Nike not devised a logo for its young star that bore a striking resemblance to the
photo. Seeking design inspiration for its first Air Jordan sneakers, Nike paid
Rentmeester $150 for temporary use of his slides from the LIFE shoot. Soon,
“Jumpman” was etched onto shoes, clothing and bedroom walls around the
world, eventually becoming one of the most popular commercial icons of all
time. With Jumpman, Nike created the concept of athletes as valuable
commercial properties unto themselves. The Air Jordan brand, which today
features other superstar pitchmen, earned $3.2 billion in 2014. Rentmeester,
meanwhile, has sued Nike for copyright infringement. No matter the outcome,
it’s clear his image captures the ascendance of sports celebrity into a
multibillion-dollar business, and it’s still taking off.
THE FACE OF AIDS | Therese Frare, 1990

‘I didn’t know that it was going to be the photo that changed how people looked
at AIDS.’ –THERESE FRARE

David Kirby died surrounded by his family. But Therese Frare’s photograph of
the 32-year-old man on his deathbed did more than just capture the
heartbreaking moment. It humanized AIDS, the disease that killed Kirby, at a
time when it was ravaging victims largely out of public view. Frare’s
photograph, published in LIFE in 1990, showed how the widely misunderstood
disease devastated more than just its victims. It would be another year before the
red ribbon became a symbol of compassion and resilience, and three years
before President Bill Clinton created a White House Office of National AIDS
Policy. In 1992 the clothing company Benetton used a colorized version of
Frare’s photograph in a series of provocative ads. Many magazines refused to
run it, and a range of groups called for a boycott. But Kirby’s family consented
to its use, believing that the ad helped raise critical awareness about AIDS at a
moment when the disease was still uncontrolled and sufferers were lobbying the
federal government to speed the development of new drugs. “We just felt it was
time that people saw the truth about AIDS,” Kirby’s mother Kay said. Thanks to
Frare’s image, they did.
DEMI MOORE | Annie Leibovitz, 1991

‘I don’t think it’s a good photograph per se. It’s a magazine cover. If it were a
great portrait, she wouldn’t be covering her breasts.’ –ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

The Hollywood star Demi Moore was seven months pregnant with her second
child when she graced the cover of Vanity Fair in nothing but her birthday suit.
Such a display was not unusual for Moore, who had the birth of her first child
recorded with three video cameras. But it was unprecedented for a mainstream
media outlet. Portraitist Annie Leibovitz made an image that celebrated
pregnancy as much as it titillated, showing how maternity could be not only
empowering but also sexy. The magazine’s editor, Tina Brown, deemed Moore’s
act a brave declaration, “a new young movie star willing to say, ‘I look beautiful
pregnant,’ and not ashamed of it.” The photo was the first mass-media picture to
sexualize pregnancy, and many found it too shocking for the newsstand. Some
grocery chains refused to stock the issue, while others covered it up like
pornography. It was not, of course. But it was a provocative magazine cover, and
it did what only the best covers can: change the culture. Once pregnancy was a
relatively private affair, even for public figures. After Leibovitz’s picture,
celebrity births, naked maternity shots and paparazzi snaps of baby bumps have
become industries unto themselves.
 EVIDENCE
Knowledge is power, said Sir Francis Bacon—and photography greatly
expanded access to that power. Before photography, humans bore witness only
with their own eyes, and what were the chances that any person would be in the
right place at the right time? All other accounts were secondhand at best; then, as
now, the credibility of retellings was questionable.
Seeing is believing. But that’s not the end of it. Believing often leads to
caring, and caring can grow into action. Civil rights leaders understood this in
the years after World War II. If only white Americans could see the disfigured
body of the lynched teenager Emmett Till, or watch as snarling police dogs
attacked peaceful demonstrators.
A photograph is not a manifesto, nor is it an agenda. But it can stir up the
ground in which movements take root. The gradual shift in public opinion
against America’s war in Vietnam, for example, cannot be separated from the
photographs that documented the chaos and brutality. Or it might be said that
Barack Obama’s road to the White House was paved with photographs from Abu
Ghraib prison, for Obama—alone among the major candidates—had opposed the
Iraq War.
This is why tyrants fear and manipulate photographs. Some images are
doctored, others are suppressed. In China, many college students have reportedly
never seen the 1989 image of a lone man confronting a column of tanks in
Tiananmen Square. The picture is too dangerous to the powers that be. It might
move others to stand up.
CATHEDRAL ROCK, YOSEMITE | Carleton Watkins, 1861

‘A perfection of art which compares with the finest European work.’ –OLIVER
WENDELL HOLMES, 1862

Decades before Ansel Adams ever saw Yosemite’s jagged peaks, Carleton
Watkins packed his mammoth plate camera, tripods and a makeshift tent
darkroom on mules and ventured into the remote California valley. At the
journey’s end, Watkins had 130 negatives that offered the first printed images of
Yosemite’s towering masses, glacial geology and jaw-dropping expanse. The
images, including Watkins’ intimate view of Cathedral Rock, floored the
growing nation’s power brokers. John Conness, a U.S. Senator from California,
owned a set of the prints and became an evangelist for the work. On June 30,
1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Yosemite Grant Act,
laying the foundation for the National Park System, which now protects some 84
million acres of land.
THE DEAD OF ANTIETAM | Alexander Gardner, 1862

‘Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and
earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards
and along the streets, he has done something very like it.’ –NEW YORK TIMES

It was at Antietam, the blood-churning battle in Sharpsburg, Md., where more

Americans died in a single day than ever had before, that one Union soldier
recalled how “the piles of dead ... were frightful.” The Scottish-born
photographer Alexander Gardner arrived there two days after the September 17,
1862, slaughter. He set up his stereo wet-plate camera and started taking dozens
of images of the body-strewn countryside, documenting fallen soldiers, burial
crews and trench graves. Gardner worked for Mathew Brady, and when he
returned to New York City his employer arranged an exhibition of the work.
Visitors were greeted with a plain sign reading “The Dead of Antietam.” But
what they saw was anything but simple. Genteel society came upon what are
believed to be the first recorded images of war casualties. Gardner’s photographs
are so sharp that people could make out faces. The death was unfiltered, and a
war that had seemed remote suddenly became harrowingly immediate. Gardner
helped make Americans realize the significance of the fratricide that by 1865
would take more than 600,000 lives. For in the hallowed fields fell not faceless
strangers but sons, brothers, fathers, cousins and friends. And Gardner’s images
of Antietam created a lasting legacy by establishing a painfully potent visual
precedent for the way all wars have since been covered.
THE VANISHING RACE | Edward S. Curtis, 1904

‘The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition,
some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other.’ –EDWARD S. CURTIS

Native Americans were the great casualty of the U.S.’s grand westward advance.
As settlers tamed the seemingly boundless stretches of the young nation, they
evicted Indians from their ancestral lands, shoving them into impoverished
reservations and forcing them to assimilate. Fearing the imminent disappearance
of America’s first inhabitants, Edward S. Curtis sought to document the assorted
tribes, to show them as a noble people—“the old time Indian, his dress, his
ceremonies, his life and manners.” Over more than two decades, Curtis turned
these pictures and observations into The North American Indian, a 20-volume
chronicle of 80 tribes. No single image embodied the project better than The
Vanishing Race, his picture of Navajo riding off into the dusty distance. To
Curtis the photo epitomized the plight of the Indians, who were “passing into the
darkness of an unknown future.” Alas, Curtis’ encyclopedic work did more than
convey the theme—it cemented a stereotype. Railroad companies soon lured
tourists west with trips to glimpse the last of a dying people, and Indians came to
be seen as a relic out of time, not an integral part of modern American society.
It’s a perception that persists to this day.
THE STEERAGE | Alfred Stieglitz, 1907

‘If all my photographs were lost and I’d be represented by just one, The Steerage,
I’d be satisfied.’ –ALFRED STIEGLITZ

As a leader of the Photo-Secession movement, Alfred Stieglitz searched for

beauty through the craftsmanlike creation of photographs, held pioneering
exhibitions of his contemporaries, published their works and sought to have the
still nascent art form taken as seriously as painting. But as modernism seeped
into the cultural ferment in the early 20th century, Stieglitz became mesmerized
by the growing cacophony of society, of rising skyscrapers and soaring
airplanes, and strove to create what he termed “straight photography,” offering
truthful takes on the real world. In 1907 he was sailing to Europe, 4x5 Speed
Graflex in tow, when he set off from the first-class deck and came upon the
huddled masses in the ship’s steerage. There, the shawled and swathed were
crammed together on the compact lower deck, the skewed geometry of the ship
emphasizing their claustrophobic accommodations and visually segregating
them from those on the upper deck. “A round straw hat; the funnel leaning left,
the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain,”
Stieglitz later wrote. “I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one
another—a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me.”
Despite its momentary impact, Stieglitz’s photo, with its clear, unapologetic take
on life, lay unnoticed for four years. But when he published it on the cover of his
magazine Camera Work, The Steerage presented a radical way of thinking about
photography, not as a momentary mimic of painting but a wholly formed and
unique type of art. Appearing at the time of a seismic revolution in the arts, with
the emergence of such seminal figures as the composer Igor Stravinsky and the
architect Walter Gropius, this, one of the first “modernist” pictures, helped
photography to be seen on a par with these other innovative forms of art. None
other than the painter Pablo Picasso admired The Steerage’s cubistic sense and
wrote that both he and Stieglitz were “working in the same spirit.”
GIRL WORKER IN CAROLINA COTTON MILL | Lewis Hine, 1908

‘Photography can light up darkness and expose ignorance.’ –LEWIS HINE

Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor

Committee, Lewis Hine believed that images of child labor would force citizens
to demand change. The muckraker conned his way into mills and factories from
Massachusetts to South Carolina by posing as a Bible seller, insurance agent or
industrial photographer in order to tell the plight of nearly 2 million children.
Carting around a large-format camera and jotting down information in a hidden
notebook, Hine recorded children laboring in meatpacking houses, coal mines
and canneries, and in November 1908 he came upon Sadie Pfeifer, who
embodied the world he exposed. A 48-inch-tall wisp of a girl, she was “one of
the many small children at work” manning a gargantuan cotton-spinning
machine in Lancaster, S.C. Since Hine often had to lie to get his shots, he made
“double-sure that my photo data was 100% pure—no retouching or fakery of any
kind.” His images of children as young as 8 dwarfed by the cogs of a cold,
mechanized universe squarely set the horrors of child labor before the public,
leading to regulatory legislation and cutting the number of child laborers nearly
in half from 1910 to 1920.
ROMANOV EXECUTION | Unknown, 1919

‘It was a visual indictment of the nation in ignorance of its history.’ –IRINA
CHMYREVA, HISTORIAN

For seven decades, the July 1918 deaths of Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra
and their four daughters and son at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg spawned
theories about the demise of the Russian royal family. The Bolsheviks clearly
killed the family as they ushered in a communist era that had little room for
nobility or dissent. Yet the family’s remains were lost. The house in the Ural
Mountains became a Museum of the Revolution and, to the annoyance of the
Soviet leadership, also attracted pro-Romanov worshippers, causing Soviet
leader Boris Yeltsin to order its destruction in 1977. But the demolition could not
bury history. For just over a decade before, Harvard University received a gift of
documents from the investigation into the deaths. Among the papers from
coroner Nikolay Sokolov’s probe was this image of the room where the deaths
took place, with the bloodstained wallpaper ripped by bullets, the shattered wall
and the plaster-covered floor all seemingly intact from the day of the massacre.
Suddenly there was visual proof of the regicide that marked the start of the
Soviet Union. It would be decades still before the nation owned up to the deaths.
In August 2000—nine years after the Soviet Union fell—the Russian Orthodox
Church canonized the Romanovs, proclaiming that these victims of Bolshevism
were “passion bearers” for their “humbleness, patience and meekness” during
their imprisonment. Churches have since been built for each of the family
members, and in 2003 the gold-domed Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints
Resplendent in the Russian Land rose on the site of Ipatiev House, a fitting
worship space for the flocking pilgrims. Five years later, the Russian Supreme
Court rehabilitated the family and ruled their execution an act of “unfounded
repression.”
HITLER AT A NAZI PARTY RALLY | Heinrich Hoffmann, 1934

‘Would you like to come with me? You’ll certainly get some very interesting
photographs!’ –HITLER TO HOFFMANN

Spectacle was like oxygen for the Nazis, and Heinrich Hoffmann was
instrumental in staging Hitler’s growing pageant of power. Hoffmann, who
joined the party in 1920 and became Hitler’s personal photographer and
confidant, was charged with choreographing the regime’s propaganda carnivals
and selling them to a wounded German public. Nowhere did Hoffmann do it
better than on September 30, 1934, in his rigidly symmetrical photo at the
Bückeberg Harvest Festival, where the Mephistophelian Führer swaggers at the
center of a grand Wagnerian fantasy of adoring and heiling troops. By capturing
this and so many other extravaganzas, Hoffmann—who took more than 2 million
photos of his boss—fed the regime’s vast propaganda machine and spread its
demonic dream. Such images were all-pervasive in Hitler’s Reich, which
shrewdly used Hoffman’s photos, the stark graphics on Nazi banners and the
films of Leni Riefenstahl to make Aryanism seem worthy of godlike worship.
Humiliated by World War I, punishing reparations and the Great Depression, a
nation eager to reclaim its sense of self was rallied by Hitler’s visage and his
seemingly invincible men aching to right wrongs. Hoffmann’s expertly rendered
propaganda is a testament to photography’s power to move nations and plunge a
world into war.
THE HINDENBURG DISASTER | Sam Shere, 1937

‘I literally ‘shot’ from the hip—it was over so fast, there was nothing else to do.’
–SAM SHERE

Zeppelins were majestic skyliners, luxurious behemoths that signified wealth

and power. The arrival of these ships was news, which is why Sam Shere of the
International News Photos service was waiting in the rain at the Lakehurst, N.J.,
Naval Air Station on May 6, 1937, for the 804-foot-long LZ 129 Hindenburg to
drift in from Frankfurt. Suddenly, as the assembled media watched, the grand
ship’s flammable hydrogen caught fire, causing it to spectacularly burst into
bright yellow flames and kill 36 people. Shere was one of nearly two dozen still
and newsreel photographers who scrambled to document the fast-moving
tragedy. But it is his image, with its stark immediacy and horrible grandeur, that
has endured as the most famous—owing to its publication on front pages around
the world and in LIFE and, more than three decades later, its use on the cover of
the first Led Zeppelin album. The crash helped bring the age of the airships to a
close, and Shere’s powerful photograph of one of the world’s most formative
early air disasters persists as a cautionary reminder of how human fallibility can
lead to death and destruction. Almost as famous as Shere’s photo is the
anguished voice of Chicago radio announcer Herbert Morrison, who cried as he
watched people tumbling through the air, “It is bursting into flames ... This is
terrible. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world ... Oh, the humanity!”
BLOODY SATURDAY | H.S. Wong, 1937

‘It was a horrible sight. People were still trying to get up. Dead and injured lay
strewn across the tracks and platform. Limbs lay all over the place. Only my
work helped me forget what I was seeing.’ –H.S. WONG

The same imperialistic desires festering in Europe in the 1930s had already
swept into Asia. Yet many Americans remained wary of wading into a conflict in
what seemed a far-off, alien land. But that opinion began to change as Japan’s
army of the Rising Sun rolled toward Shanghai in the summer of 1937. Fighting
started there in August, and the unrelenting shelling and bombing caused mass
panic and death in the streets. But the rest of the world didn’t put a face to the
victims until they saw the aftermath of an August 28 attack by Japanese
bombers. When H.S. Wong, a photographer for Hearst Metrotone News
nicknamed Newsreel, arrived at the destroyed South Station, he recalled carnage
so fresh “that my shoes were soaked with blood.” In the midst of the devastation,
Wong saw a wailing Chinese baby whose mother lay dead on nearby tracks. He
said he quickly shot his remaining film and then ran to carry the baby to safety,
but not before the boy’s father raced over and ferried him away. Wong’s image
of the wounded, helpless infant was sent to New York and featured in Hearst
newsreels, newspapers and LIFE magazine—the widest audience a picture could
then have. Viewed by more than 136 million people, it struck a personal chord
that transcended ethnicity and geography. To many, the infant’s pain represented
the plight of China and the bloodlust of Japan, and the photo dubbed Bloody
Saturday was transformed into one of the most powerful news pictures of all
time. Its dissemination reveals the potent force of an image to sway official and
public opinion. Wong’s picture led the U.S., Britain and France to formally
protest the attack and helped shift Western sentiment in favor of wading into
what would become the world’s second great war.
GRIEF | Dmitri Baltermants, 1942

‘War is, above all, grief.’ –DMITRI BALTERMANTS

The Polish-born Dmitri Baltermants had planned to be a math teacher but instead
fell in love with photography. Just as World War II broke out, he got a call from
his bosses at the Soviet government paper Izvestia: “Our troops are crossing the
border tomorrow. Get ready to shoot the annexation of western Ukraine!” At the
time the Soviet Union considered Nazi Germany its ally. But after Adolf Hitler
turned on his comrades and invaded the Soviet Union, Baltermants’ mission
changed too. Covering what then became known as the Great Patriotic War, he
captured grim images of body-littered roads along with those of troops enjoying
quiet moments. In January 1942 he was in the newly liberated city of Kerch,
Crimea, where two months earlier Nazi death squads had rounded up the town’s
7,000 Jews. “They drove out whole families—women, the elderly, children,”
Baltermants recalled years later. “They drove all of them to an antitank ditch and
shot them.” There Baltermants came upon a bleak, corpse-choked field, the
outstretched limbs of old and young alike frozen in the last moment of pleading.
Some of the gathered townspeople wailed, their arms wide. Others hunched in
paroxysms of grief. Baltermants, who witnessed more than his share of death,
recorded what he saw. Yet these images of mass Nazi murders on Soviet soil
were too graphic for his nation’s leaders, wary of displaying the suffering of
their people. Like many of Baltermants’ photos, this one was censored, being
shown only decades later as liberalism seeped into Russian society in the 1960s.
When it finally emerged, Baltermants’ picture allowed generations of Russians
to form a collective memory of their great war. “You do your work the best you
can,” he somberly observed, “and someday it will surface.”
JEWISH BOY SURRENDERS IN WARSAW | Unknown, 1943

‘I hold a report written with Teutonic devotion to detail, illustrated with

photographs to authenticate its almost incredible text.’ –ROBERT JACKSON, CHIEF
U.S. PROSECUTOR AT THE NUREMBURG TRIALS

The terrified young boy with his hands raised at the center of this image was one
of nearly half a million Jews packed into the Warsaw ghetto, a neighborhood
transformed by the Nazis into a walled compound of grinding starvation and
death. Beginning in July 1942, the German occupiers started shipping some
5,000 Warsaw inhabitants a day to concentration camps. As news of
exterminations seeped back, the ghetto’s residents formed a resistance group.
“We saw ourselves as a Jewish underground whose fate was a tragic one,” wrote
its young leader Mordecai Anielewicz. “For our hour had come without any sign
of hope or rescue.” That hour arrived on April 19, 1943, when Nazi troops came
to take the rest of the Jews away. The sparsely armed partisans fought back but
were eventually subdued by German tanks and flamethrowers. When the revolt
ended on May 16, the 56,000 survivors faced summary execution or deportation
to concentration and slave-labor camps. SS Major General Jürgen Stroop took
such pride in his work clearing out the ghetto that he created the Stroop Report, a
leather-bound victory album whose 75 pages include a laundry list of boastful
spoils, reports of daily killings and dozens of heart-wrenching photos like that of
the boy raising his hands. This collection proved his undoing, for besides giving
a face to those who died, the pictures reveal the power of photography as a
documentary tool. At the subsequent Nuremburg war-crimes trials, the volume
became key evidence against Stroop and resulted in his hanging near the ghetto
in 1951. The Holocaust produced scores of searing images. But none had the
evidentiary impact of the boy’s surrender. The child, whose identity has never
been confirmed, has come to represent the face of the 6 million defenseless Jews
killed by the Nazis.
THE CRITIC | Weegee, 1943

‘I couldn’t see what I was snapping but could almost smell the smugness.’
–WEEGEE

Arthur Fellig had a sharp eye for the unfairness of life. An Austrian immigrant
who grew up on the gritty streets of New York City’s Lower East Side, Fellig
became known as Weegee—a phonetic take on Ouija—for his preternatural
ability to get the right photo. Often these were film-noirish images of crime,
tragedy and the denizens of nocturnal New York. In 1943, Weegee turned his
Speed Graphic camera’s blinding flash on the social and economic inequalities
that lingered after the Great Depression. Not averse to orchestrating a shot, he
dispatched his assistant, Louie Liotta, to a Bowery dive in search of an
inebriated woman. He found a willing subject and took her to the Metropolitan
Opera House for its Diamond Jubilee celebration. Then Liotta set her up near the
entrance while Weegee watched for the arrival of Mrs. George Washington
Kavanaugh and Lady Decies, two wealthy women who regularly graced society
columns. When the tiara- and fur-bedecked socialites arrived for the opera,
Weegee gave Liotta the signal to spring the drunk woman. “It was like an
explosion,” Liotta recalled. “I thought I went blind from the three or four flash
exposures.” With that flash, Weegee captured the stark juxtaposition of fabulous
wealth and dire poverty, in a gotcha style that anticipated the commercial appeal
of paparazzi decades later. The photo appeared in LIFE under the headline “The
Fashionable People,” and the piece let readers know how the women’s “entry
was viewed with distaste by a spectator.” That The Critic was later revealed to
have been staged did little to dampen its influence.
D-DAY | Robert Capa, 1944

‘It never occurred to me until later that in order to take that picture, Capa had to
get ahead of that soldier and turn his back on the action.’ –JOHN MORRIS, CAPA’S
EDITOR AT LIFE

It was the invasion to save civilization, and LIFE’s Robert Capa was there, the
only still photographer to wade with the 34,250 troops onto Omaha Beach
during the D-Day landing. His photographs—infused with jarring movement
from the center of that brutal assault—gave the public an American soldier’s
view of the dangers of war. The soldier in this case was Private First Class
Huston Riley, who after the Nazis shelled his landing craft jumped into water so
deep that he had to walk along the bottom until he could hold his breath no
more. When he activated his Navy M-26 belt life preservers and floated to the
surface, Riley became a target for the guns and artillery shells mowing down his
comrades. Struck several times, the 22-year-old soldier took about half an hour
to reach the Normandy shore. Capa took this photo of him in the surf and then
with the assistance of a sergeant helped Riley, who later recalled thinking, “What
the hell is this guy doing here? I can’t believe it. Here’s a cameraman on the
shore.” Capa spent an hour and a half under fire as men around him died. A
courier then transported his four rolls of film to LIFE’s London offices, and the
magazine’s general manager stopped the presses to get them into the June 19
issue. Most of the film, though, showed no images after processing, and only
some frames survived. The remaining images have a grainy, blurry look that
gives them the frenetic feel of action, a quality that has come to define our
collective memory of that epic clash.
MUSHROOM CLOUD OVER NAGASAKI | Lieutenant Charles
Levy, 1945

‘Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from the
bowels of the earth.’ –WILLIAM L. LAURENCE, EYEWITNESS

Three days after an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy obliterated Hiroshima,
Japan, U.S. forces dropped an even more powerful weapon dubbed Fat Man on
Nagasaki. The explosion shot up a 45,000-foot-high column of radioactive dust
and debris. “We saw this big plume climbing up, up into the sky,” recalled
Lieutenant Charles Levy, the bombardier, who was knocked over by the blow
from the 20-kiloton weapon. “It was purple, red, white, all colors—something
like boiling coffee. It looked alive.” The officer then shot 16 photographs of the
new weapon’s awful power as it yanked the life out of some 80,000 people in the
city on the Urakami River. Six days later, the two bombs forced Emperor
Hirohito to announce Japan’s unconditional surrender in World War II. Officials
censored photos of the bomb’s devastation, but Levy’s image—the only one to
show the full scale of the mushroom cloud from the air—was circulated widely.
The effect shaped American opinion in favor of the nuclear bomb, leading the
nation to celebrate the atomic age and proving, yet again, that history is written
by the victors.
EMMETT TILL | David Jackson, 1955

‘When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never
stood up before.’ –MAMIE TILL-MOBLEY

In August 1955, Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was visiting
relatives in Mississippi when he stopped at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market.
There he encountered Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. Whether Till really
flirted with Bryant or whistled at her isn’t known. But what happened four days
later is. Bryant’s husband Roy and his half brother, J.W. Milam, seized the 14-
year-old from his great-uncle’s house. The pair then beat Till, shot him, and
strung barbed wire and a 75-pound metal fan around his neck and dumped the
lifeless body in the Tallahatchie River. A white jury quickly acquitted the men,
with one juror saying it had taken so long only because they had to break to
drink some pop. When Till’s mother Mamie came to identify her son, she told
the funeral director, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” She brought him home
to Chicago and insisted on an open casket. Tens of thousands filed past Till’s
remains, but it was the publication of the searing funeral image in Jet, with a
stoic Mamie gazing at her murdered child’s ravaged body, that forced the world
to reckon with the brutality of American racism. For almost a century, African
Americans were lynched with regularity and impunity. Now, thanks to a
mother’s determination to expose the barbarousness of the crime, the public
could no longer pretend to ignore what they couldn’t see.
LEAP INTO FREEDOM | Peter Leibing, 1961

‘I stood there for two hours, looking toward West Berlin and looking back at
East Berlin. Then I jumped.’ –HANS CONRAD SCHUMANN

Following World War II, the conquering Allied governments carved Berlin into
four occupation zones. Yet each part was not equal, and from 1949 to 1961 some
2.5 million East Germans fled the Soviet section in search of freedom. To stop
the flow, East German leader Walter Ulbricht had a barbed-wire-and-cinder-
block barrier thrown up in early August 1961. A few days later, Associated Press
photographer Peter Leibing was tipped off that a defection might happen. He and
other cameramen gathered and watched as a West Berlin crowd enticed 19-year-
old border guard Hans Conrad Schumann, yelling to him, “Come on over!”
Schumann, who later said he did not want to “live enclosed,” suddenly ran for
the barricade. As he cleared the sharp wires he dropped his rifle and was
whisked away. Sent out across the AP wire, Leibing’s photo ran on front pages
across the world. It made Schumann, reportedly the first known East German
soldier to flee, into a poster child for those yearning to be free, while lending
urgency to East Germany’s push for a more permanent Berlin Wall. Schumann
was sadly haunted by the weight of it all. While he quietly lived in the West, he
could not grapple with his unintended stature as a symbol of freedom, and he
committed suicide in 1998.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA | Charles Moore, 1963

‘The photographs of Bull Connor’s police dogs lunging at the marchers in

Birmingham did as much as anything to transform the national mood.’ –ARTHUR
SCHLESINGER JR., HISTORIAN

Sometimes the most effective mirror is a photograph. In the summer of 1963,

Birmingham was boiling over as black residents and their allies in the civil rights
movement repeatedly clashed with a white power structure intent on maintaining
segregation—and willing to do whatever that took. A photographer for the
Montgomery Advertiser and LIFE, Charles Moore was a native Alabaman and
son of a Baptist preacher appalled by the violence inflicted on African
Americans in the name of law and order. Though he photographed many other
seminal moments of the movement, it was Moore’s image of a police dog tearing
into a black protester’s pants that captured the routine, even casual, brutality of
segregation. When the picture was published in LIFE, it quickly became apparent
to the rest of the world what Moore had long known: ending segregation was not
about eroding culture but about restoring humanity. Hesitant politicians soon
took up the cause and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nearly a year later.
THE BURNING MONK | Malcolm Browne, 1963

‘I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and that protected me from the
horror of the thing.’ –MALCOLM BROWNE

In June 1963, most Americans couldn’t find Vietnam on a map. But there was no
forgetting that war-torn Southeast Asian nation after Associated Press
photographer Malcolm Browne captured the image of Thich Quang Duc
immolating himself on a Saigon street. Browne had been given a heads-up that
something was going to happen to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the
regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Once there he watched as two monks
doused the seated elderly man with gasoline. “I realized at that moment exactly
what was happening, and began to take pictures a few seconds apart,” he wrote
soon after. His Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of the seemingly serene monk
sitting lotus style as he is enveloped in flames became the first iconic image to
emerge from a quagmire that would soon pull in America. Quang Duc’s act of
martyrdom became a sign of the volatility of his nation, and President Kennedy
later commented, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion
around the world as that one.” Browne’s photo forced people to question the
U.S.’s association with Diem’s government, and soon resulted in the
Administration’s decision not to interfere with a coup that November.
JFK ASSASSINATION, FRAME 313 | Abraham Zapruder, 1963

‘After that tragedy somehow I lost—I don’t know what you’d call it—my
appetite, or my desire to take pictures.’ –ABRAHAM ZAPRUDER

It is the most famous home movie ever, and the most carefully studied image, an
8-millimeter film that captured the death of a President. The movie is just as well
known for what many say it does or does not reveal, and its existence has
fostered countless conspiracy theories about that day in Dallas. But no one
would argue that what it shows is not utterly heartbreaking, the last moments of
life of the youthful and charismatic John Fitzgerald Kennedy as he rode with his
wife Jackie through Dealey Plaza. Amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder
had eagerly set out with his Bell & Howell camera on the morning of November
22, 1963, to record the arrival of his hero. Yet as Zapruder filmed, one bullet
struck Kennedy in the back, and as the President’s car passed in front of
Zapruder, a second one hit him in the head. LIFE correspondent Richard Stolley
bought the film the following day, and the magazine ran 31 of the 486 frames—
which meant that the first public viewing of Zapruder’s famous film was as a
series of still images. At the time, LIFE withheld the gruesome frame No. 313—a
picture that became influential by its absence. That one, where the bullet
exploded the side of Kennedy’s head, is still shocking when seen today, a
reminder of the seeming suddenness of death. What Zapruder captured that
sunny day would haunt him for the rest of his life. It is something that unsettles
America, a dark dream that hovers at the back of our collective psyche, an image
from a wisp of 26.5 seconds of film whose gut-wrenching impact reminds us
how everything can change in a fraction of a moment.
SAIGON EXECUTION | Eddie Adams, 1968

‘Two people’s lives were destroyed that day. The general’s life was destroyed as
well as the life of the Viet Cong. I don’t want to destroy anyone’s life. That’s not
my job.’ –EDDIE ADAMS

The act was stunning in its casualness. Associated Press photographer Eddie
Adams was on the streets of Saigon on February 1, 1968, two days after the
forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong set off the Tet
offensive and swarmed into dozens of South Vietnamese cities. As Adams
photographed the turmoil, he came upon Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan,
chief of the national police, standing alongside Nguyen Van Lem, the captain of
a terrorist squad who had just killed the family of one of Loan’s friends. Adams
thought he was watching the interrogation of a bound prisoner. But as he looked
through his viewfinder, Loan calmly raised his .38-caliber pistol and summarily
fired a bullet through Lem’s head. After shooting the suspect, the general
justified the suddenness of his actions by saying, “If you hesitate, if you didn’t
do your duty, the men won’t follow you.” The Tet offensive raged into March.
Yet while U.S. forces beat back the communists, press reports of the anarchy
convinced Americans that the war was unwinnable. The freezing of the moment
of Lem’s death symbolized for many the brutality over there, and the picture’s
widespread publication helped galvanize growing sentiment in America about
the futility of the fight. More important, Adams’ photo ushered in a more
intimate level of war photojournalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for this image,
and as he commented three decades later about the reach of his work, “Still
photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world.”
INVASION OF PRAGUE | Josef Koudelka, 1968

‘You cannot rely on your memories—but you can rely on your pictures.’ –JOSEF
KOUDELKA

The Soviets did not care for the “socialism with a human face” that Alexander
Dubcek’s government brought to Czechoslovakia. Fearing that Dubcek’s human-
rights reforms would lead to a democratic uprising like the one in Hungary in
1956, Warsaw Bloc forces set out to quash the movement. Their tanks rolled into
Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968. And while they quickly seized control of
Prague, they unexpectedly ran up against masses of flag-waving citizens who
threw up barricades, stoned tanks, overturned trucks and even removed street
signs in order to confuse the troops. Josef Koudelka, a young Moravian-born
engineer who had been taking wistful and gritty photos of Czech life, was in the
capital when the soldiers arrived. He took pictures of the swirling turmoil and
created a groundbreaking record of the invasion that would change the course of
his nation. The most seminal piece includes a man’s arm in the foreground,
showing on his wristwatch a moment of the Soviet invasion with a deserted
street in the distance. It beautifully encapsulates time, loss and emptiness—and
the strangling of a society.
Koudelka’s visual memories of the unfolding conflict—with its evidence of
the ticking time, the brutality of the attack and the challenges by Czech citizens
—redefined photojournalism. His pictures were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia
and appeared in the London Sunday Times in 1969, though under the
pseudonym P.P. for Prague Photographer since Koudelka feared reprisals. He
soon fled, his rationale for leaving the country a testament to the power of
photographic evidence: “I was afraid to go back to Czechoslovakia because I
knew that if they wanted to find out who the unknown photographer was, they
could do it.”
A MAN ON THE MOON | Neil Armstrong, NASA, 1969

‘It is a truly astounding shot and was the result of an entirely serendipitous
moment.’ –BUZZ ALDRIN

Somewhere in the Sea of Tranquillity, the little depression in which Buzz Aldrin
stood on the evening of July 20, 1969, is still there—one of billions of pits and
craters and pockmarks on the moon’s ancient surface. But it may not be the
astronaut’s most indelible mark.
Aldrin never cared for being the second man on the moon—to come so far
and miss the epochal first-man designation Neil Armstrong earned by a mere
matter of inches and minutes. But Aldrin earned a different kind of immortality.
Since it was Armstrong who was carrying the crew’s 70-millimeter Hasselblad,
he took all of the pictures—meaning the only moon man earthlings would see
clearly would be the one who took the second steps. That this image endured the
way it has was not likely. It has none of the action of the shots of Aldrin
climbing down the ladder of the lunar module, none of the patriotic resonance of
his saluting the American flag. He’s just standing in place, a small, fragile man
on a distant world—a world that would be happy to kill him if he removed so
much as a single article of his exceedingly complex clothing. His arm is bent
awkwardly—perhaps, he has speculated, because he was glancing at the
checklist on his wrist. And Armstrong, looking even smaller and more spectral,
is reflected in his visor. It’s a picture that in some ways did everything wrong if
it was striving for heroism. As a result, it did everything right.
KENT STATE SHOOTINGS | John Paul Filo, 1970

‘I could see the tension building in this girl, and finally she let out with the
scream, and I sort of reacted to the scream and shot that picture.’ –JOHN PAUL FILO

The shooting at Kent State University in Ohio lasted 13 seconds. When it was
over, four students were dead, nine were wounded, and the innocence of a
generation was shattered. The demonstrators were part of a national wave of
student discontent spurred by the new presence of U.S. troops in Cambodia. At
the Kent State Commons, protesters assumed that the National Guard troops that
had been called to contain the crowds were firing blanks. But when the shooting
stopped and students lay dead, it seemed that the war in Southeast Asia had
come home. John Filo, a student and part-time news photographer, distilled that
feeling into a single image when he captured Mary Ann Vecchio crying out and
kneeling over a fatally wounded Jeffrey Miller. Filo’s photograph was put out on
the AP wire and printed on the front page of the New York Times. It went on to
win the Pulitzer Prize and has since become the visual symbol of a hopeful
nation’s lost youth. As Neil Young wrote in the song “Ohio,” inspired by a LIFE
story featuring Filo’s images, “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/ We’re finally on
our own/ This summer I hear the drumming/ Four dead in Ohio.”
THE TERROR OF WAR | Nick Ut, 1972

‘I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body.’ –KIM PHUC

The faces of collateral damage and friendly fire are generally not seen. This was
not the case with 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc. On June 8, 1972, Associated
Press photographer Nick Ut was outside Trang Bang, about 25 miles northwest
of Saigon, when the South Vietnamese air force mistakenly dropped a load of
napalm on the village. As the Vietnamese photographer took pictures of the
carnage, he saw a group of children and soldiers along with a screaming naked
girl running up the highway toward him. Ut wondered, Why doesn’t she have
clothes? He then realized that she had been hit by napalm. “I took a lot of water
and poured it on her body. She was screaming, ‘Too hot! Too hot!’” Ut took Kim
Phuc to a hospital, where he learned that she might not survive the third-degree
burns covering 30 percent of her body. So with the help of colleagues he got her
transferred to an American facility for treatment that saved her life. Ut’s photo of
the raw impact of conflict underscored that the war was doing more harm than
good. It also sparked newsroom debates about running a photo with nudity,
pushing many publications, including the New York Times, to override their
policies. The photo quickly became a cultural shorthand for the atrocities of the
Vietnam War and joined Malcolm Browne’s Burning Monk and Eddie Adams’
Saigon Execution as defining images of that brutal conflict. When President
Richard Nixon wondered if the photo was fake, Ut commented, “The horror of
the Vietnam War recorded by me did not have to be fixed.” In 1973 the Pulitzer
committee agreed and awarded him its prize. That same year, America’s
involvement in the war ended.
MUNICH MASSACRE | Kurt Strumpf, 1972

‘The violence emerges unexpectedly and faceless out of the predictable order.’
–KURT STRUMPF

The Olympics celebrate the best of humanity, and in 1972 Germany welcomed
the Games to exalt its athletes, tout its democracy and purge the stench of Adolf
Hitler’s 1936 Games. The Germans called it “the Games of peace and joy,” and
as Israeli fencer Dan Alon recalled, “Taking part in the opening ceremony, only
36 years after Berlin, was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.”
Security was lax so as to project the feeling of harmony. Unfortunately, this
made it easy on September 5 for eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group
Black September to raid the Munich Olympic Village building housing Israeli
Olympians. Armed with grenades and assault rifles, the terrorists killed two team
members, took nine hostage and demanded the release of 234 of their jailed
compatriots. The 21-hour hostage standoff presented the world with its first live
window on terrorism, and 900 million people tuned in. During the siege, one of
the Black Septemberists made his way out onto the apartment’s balcony. As he
did, Associated Press photographer Kurt Strumpf froze this haunting image, the
faceless look of terror. As the Palestinians attempted to flee, German snipers
tried to take them out, and the Palestinians killed the hostages and a policeman.
The already fraught Arab-Israeli relationship became even more so, and the
siege led to retaliatory attacks on Palestinian bases. Strumpf’s photo of that
specter with cut-out eyes is a sobering reminder of how we were all diminished
when the world realized that nothing was secure.
FIRE ESCAPE COLLAPSE | Stanley Forman, 1975

‘I was shooting a routine rescue when it suddenly went to hell.’ –STANLEY

FORMAN

Stanley Forman was working for the Boston Herald American on July 22, 1975,
when he got a call about a fire on Marlborough Street. He raced over in time to
see a woman and child on a fifth-floor fire escape. A fireman had set out to help
them, and Forman figured he was shooting another routine rescue. “Suddenly the
fire escape gave way,” he recalled, and Diana Bryant, 19, and her goddaughter
Tiare Jones, 2, were swimming through the air. “I was shooting pictures as they
were falling—then I turned away. It dawned on me what was happening, and I
didn’t want to see them hit the ground. I can still remember turning around and
shaking.” Bryant died from the fall, her body cushioning the blow for her
goddaughter, who survived. While the event was no different from the routine
tragedies that fill the local news, Forman’s picture of it was. Using a motor-drive
camera, Forman was able to freeze the horrible tumbling moment down to the
expression on young Tiare’s face. The photo earned Forman the Pulitzer Prize
and led municipalities around the country to enact tougher fire-escape-safety
codes. But its lasting legacy is as much ethical as temporal. Many readers
objected to the publication of Forman’s picture, and it remains a case study in
the debate over when disturbing images are worth sharing.
SOWETO UPRISING | Sam Nzima, 1976

‘The police were flying in front of me, shooting the students on the side.’ –SAM
NZIMA

Few outside South Africa paid much attention to apartheid before June 16, 1976,
when several thousand Soweto students set out to protest the introduction of
mandatory Afrikaans-language instruction in their township schools. Along the
way they gathered youngsters from other schools, including a 13-year-old
student named Hector Pieterson. Skirmishes started to break out with the police,
and at one point officers fired tear gas. When students hurled stones, the police
shot real bullets into the crowd. “At first, I ran away from the scene,” recalled
Sam Nzima, who was covering the protests for the World, the paper that was the
house organ of black Johannesburg. “But then, after recovering myself, I went
back.” That is when Nzima says he spotted Pieterson fall down as gunfire
showered above. He kept taking pictures as terrified high schooler Mbuyisa
Makhubu picked up the lifeless boy and ran with Pieterson’s sister, Antoinette
Sithole. What began as a peaceful protest soon turned into a violent uprising,
claiming hundreds of lives across South Africa. Prime Minister John Vorster
warned, “This government will not be intimidated.” But the armed rulers were
powerless against Nzima’s photo of Pieterson, which showed how the South
African regime killed its own people. The picture’s publication forced Nzima
into hiding amid death threats, but its effect could not have been more visible.
Suddenly the world could no longer ignore apartheid. The seeds of international
opposition that would eventually topple the racist system had been planted by a
photograph.
BOAT OF NO SMILES | Eddie Adams, 1977

‘This is the first time in my life that nobody smiled, not even the children.’
–EDDIE ADAMS

It’s easy to ignore the plight of refugees. They are seen as numbers more than
people, moving from one distant land to the next. But a picture can puncture that
illusion. The sun hadn’t yet risen on Thanksgiving Day in 1977 when Associated
Press photographer Eddie Adams watched a fishing boat packed with South
Vietnamese refugees drift toward Thailand. He was on patrol with Thai maritime
authorities as the unstable vessel carrying about 50 people came to shore after
days at sea. Thousands of refugees had streamed from postwar Vietnam since the
American withdrawal more than two years earlier, fleeing communism by
fanning out across Southeast Asia in search of safe harbor. Often they were
pushed back into the abyss and told to go somewhere else. Adams boarded the
packed fishing boat and began shooting. He didn’t have long. Eventually Thai
authorities demanded that he disembark—wary, Adams believed, that his
presence would create sympathy for the refugees that might compel Thailand to
open its doors. On that score, they were right. Adams transmitted his pictures
and wrote a short report, and within days they were published widely. The
images were presented to Congress, helping to open the doors for more than
200,000 refugees from Vietnam to enter the U.S. from 1978 to 1981. “The
pictures did it,” Adams said, “pushed it over.”
FIRING SQUAD IN IRAN | Jahangir Razmi, 1979

‘The most stirring execution picture in the history of photojournalism.’ –REZA

DEGHATI, IRANIAN PHOTOGRAPHER

Few images are as stark as one of an execution. On August 27, 1979, 11 men
who had been convicted of being “counterrevolutionary” by the regime of
Iranian ruler Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini were lined up on a dirt field at
Sanandaj Airport and gunned down side by side. No international journalists
witnessed the killings. They had been banned from Iran by Khomeini, which
meant it was up to the domestic press to chronicle the bloody conflict between
the theocracy and the local Kurds, who had been denied representation in
Khomeini’s government. The Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi had been
tipped off to the trial, and he shot two rolls of film at the executions. One image,
with bodies crumpled on the ground and another man moments from joining
them, was published anonymously on the front page of the Iranian daily
Ettela’at. Within hours, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Council appeared
at the paper’s office and demanded the photographer’s name. The editor refused.
Days later, the picture was picked up by the news service UPI and trumpeted in
papers around the world as evidence of the murderous nature of Khomeini’s
brand of religious government. The following year, Firing Squad in Iran was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize—the only anonymous winner in history. It was not
until 2006 that Razmi was revealed as the photographer.
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS | Donna Ferrato, 1982

‘I also was thinking if I get a picture of this, at least people will believe that it
really happened.’ –DONNA FERRATO

There was nothing particularly special about Garth and Lisa or the violence that
happened in the bathroom of their suburban New Jersey home one night in 1982.
Enraged by a perceived slight, Garth beat his wife while she cowered in a corner.
Such acts of intimate-partner violence are not uncommon, but they usually
happen in private. This time another person was in the room, photographer
Donna Ferrato.
Ferrato, who had come to know the couple through a photo project on
wealthy swingers, knew that simply bearing witness wasn’t enough. Her shutter
clicked again and again. Ferrato approached magazine editors to publish the
images, but all refused. So Ferrato did, in her 1991 book Living With the Enemy.
The landmark volume chronicled domestic-violence episodes and their
aftermaths, including those of the pseudonymous Garth and Lisa. Their real
names are Elisabeth and Bengt; his identity was revealed for the first time as part
of this project. Ferrato captured incidents and victims while living inside
women’s shelters and shadowing police. Her work helped bring violence against
women out of the shadows and forced policymakers to confront the issue. In
1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, increasing penalties
against offenders and helping train police to treat it as a serious crime. Thanks to
Ferrato, a private tragedy became a public cause.
TANK MAN | Jeff Widener, 1989

‘When I got up to the room, what made me totally unsettled was that there was a
bullet hole right behind me on the wall, so I knew I was easy pickins for
anybody that wanted to get me.’ –JEFF WIDENER

On the morning of June 5, 1989, photographer Jeff Widener was perched on a

sixth-floor balcony of the Beijing Hotel. It was a day after the Tiananmen Square
massacre, when Chinese troops attacked pro-democracy demonstrators camped
on the plaza, and the Associated Press sent Widener to document the aftermath.
As he photographed bloody victims, passersby on bicycles and the occasional
scorched bus, a column of tanks began rolling out of the plaza. Widener lined up
his lens just as a man carrying shopping bags stepped in front of the war
machines, waving his arms and refusing to move.
The tanks tried to go around the man, but he stepped back into their path,
climbing atop one briefly. Widener assumed the man would be killed, but the
tanks held their fire. Eventually the man was whisked away, but not before
Widener immortalized his singular act of resistance. Others also captured the
scene, but Widener’s image was transmitted over the AP wire and appeared on
front pages all over the world. Decades after Tank Man became a global hero, he
remains unidentified. The anonymity makes the photograph all the more
universal, a symbol of resistance to unjust regimes everywhere.
BOSNIA | Ron Haviv, 1992

‘He introduced the world to the brutality of Arkan’s men.’ –DERMOT GROOME,
INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE PROSECUTOR

It can take time for even the most shocking images to have an effect. The war in
Bosnia had not yet begun when American Ron Haviv took this picture of a Serb
kicking a Muslim woman who had been shot by Serb forces. Haviv had gained
access to the Tigers, a brutal nationalist militia that had warned him not to
photograph any killings. But Haviv was determined to document the cruelty he
was witnessing and, in a split second, decided to risk it. TIME published the photo
a week later, and the image of casual hatred ignited broad debate over the
international response to the worsening conflict. Still, the war continued for
more than three years, and Haviv—who was put on a hit list by the Tigers’
leader, Zeljko Raznatovic, or Arkan—was frustrated by the tepid reaction.
Almost 100,000 people lost their lives. Before his assassination in 2000, Arkan
was indicted for crimes against humanity. Haviv’s image was used as evidence
against him and other perpetrators of what became known as ethnic cleansing.
FAMINE IN SOMALIA | James Nachtwey, 1992

‘If people are in need, or if they are suffering, it does not mean they don’t
express dignity.’ –JAMES NACHTWEY

James Nachtwey couldn’t get an assignment in 1992 to document the spiraling

famine in Somalia. Mogadishu had become engulfed in armed conflict as food
prices soared and international assistance failed to keep pace. Yet few in the
West took much notice, so the American photographer went on his own to
Somalia, where he received support from the International Committee of the Red
Cross. Nachtwey brought back a cache of haunting images, including this scene
of a woman waiting to be taken to a feeding center in a wheelbarrow. After it
was published as part of a cover feature in the New York Times Magazine, one
reader wrote, “Dare we say that it doesn’t get any worse than this?” The world
was similarly moved. The Red Cross said public support resulted in what was
then its largest operation since World War II. One and a half million people were
saved, the ICRC’s Jean-Daniel Tauxe told the Times, and “James’ pictures made
the difference.”
STARVING CHILD AND VULTURE | Kevin Carter, 1993

‘This is my most successful image after 10 years of taking pictures, but I do not
hang it on my wall. I hate it.’ –KEVIN CARTER

Kevin Carter knew the stench of death. As a member of the Bang-Bang Club, a
quartet of brave photographers who chronicled apartheid-era South Africa, he
had seen more than his share of heartbreak. In 1993 he flew to Sudan to
photograph the famine racking that land. Exhausted after a day of taking pictures
in the village of Ayod, he headed out into the open bush. There he heard
whimpering and came across an emaciated toddler who had collapsed on the
way to a feeding center. As he took the child’s picture, a plump vulture landed
nearby. Carter had reportedly been advised not to touch the victims because of
disease, so instead of helping, he spent 20 minutes waiting in the hope that the
stalking bird would open its wings. It did not. Carter scared the creature away
and watched as the child continued toward the center. He then lit a cigarette,
talked to God and wept. The New York Times ran the photo, and readers were
eager to find out what happened to the child—and to criticize Carter for not
coming to his subject’s aid. His image quickly became a wrenching case study in
the debate over when photographers should intervene. Subsequent research
seemed to reveal that the child did survive yet died 14 years later from malarial
fever. Carter won a Pulitzer for his image, but the darkness of that bright day
never lifted from him. In July 1994 he took his own life, writing, “I am haunted
by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain.”
SURFING HIPPOS | Michael Nichols, 2000

‘If you want to bring governments and the common man to move on something,
they have to be captivated by it.’ –J. MICHAEL FAY, EXPLORER

Seven billion human beings take up a certain amount of space, which is one
reason why wilderness—true, untouched wilderness—is fast dwindling around
the world. Even in Africa, where lions and elephants still roam, the space for
wild animals is shrinking. That’s what makes Michael Nichols’ photograph so
special. Nichols and the National Geographic Society explorer Michael Fay
undertook an arduous 2,000-mile trek from the Congo in central Africa to Gabon
on the continent’s west coast. That was where Nichols captured a photograph of
something astonishing—hippopotamuses swimming in the midnight blue
Atlantic Ocean. It was an event few had seen before—while hippos spend most
of their time in water, their habitat is more likely to be an inland river or swamp
than the crashing sea.
The photograph itself is reliably beautiful, the eyes and snout of the hippo
peeking just above the rippling ocean surface. But its effect was more than
aesthetic. Gabon President Omar Bongo was inspired by Nichols’ pictures to
create a system of national parks that now cover 11 percent of the country,
ensuring that there will be at least some space left for the wild.
FALLING MAN | Richard Drew, 2001

‘I’ve never regretted taking that photograph.’ –RICHARD DREW

The most widely seen images from 9/11 are of planes and towers, not people.
Falling Man is different. The photo, taken by Richard Drew in the moments after
the September 11, 2001, attacks, is one man’s distinct escape from the collapsing
buildings, a symbol of individuality against the backdrop of faceless skyscrapers.
On a day of mass tragedy, Falling Man is one of the only widely seen pictures
that shows someone dying. The photo was published in newspapers around the
U.S. in the days after the attacks, but backlash from readers forced it into
temporary obscurity. It can be a difficult image to process, the man perfectly
bisecting the iconic towers as he darts toward the earth like an arrow. Falling
Man’s identity is still unknown, but he is believed to have been an employee at
the Windows on the World restaurant, which sat atop the north tower. The true
power of Falling Man, however, is less about who its subject was and more
about what he became: a makeshift Unknown Soldier in an often unknown and
uncertain war, suspended forever in history.
THE HOODED MAN | Sergeant Ivan Frederick, 2003

‘The war in Iraq, like Vietnam, will probably be remembered as the one time that
we were not the heroes. We were not the saviors. And these photographs will
play a big part in that.’ –BRENT PACK, ARMY INVESTIGATOR

Hundreds of photojournalists covered the conflict in Iraq, but the most

memorable image from the war was taken not by a professional but by a U.S.
Army staff sergeant named Ivan Frederick. In the last three months of 2003,
Frederick was the senior enlisted man at Abu Ghraib prison, the facility on the
outskirts of Baghdad that Saddam Hussein had made into a symbol of terror for
all Iraqis, then being used by the U.S. military as a detention center for suspected
insurgents. Even before the Iraq War began, many questioned the motives of the
American, British and allied governments for the invasion that toppled Saddam.
But nothing undermined the allies’ claim that they were helping bring democracy
to the country more than the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was one of
several soldiers who took part in the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. All
the more incredible was that they took thousands of images of their
mistreatment, humiliation and torture of detainees with digital cameras and
shared the photographs. The most widely disseminated was “the Hooded Man,”
partly because it was less explicit than many of the others and so could more
easily appear in mainstream publications. The man with outstretched arms in the
photograph was deprived of his sight, his clothes, his dignity and, with electric
wires, his sense of personal safety. And his pose? It seemed deliberately,
unnervingly Christlike. The liberating invaders, it seemed, held nothing sacred.
COFFIN BAN | Tami Silicio, 2004

‘My feelings were so built up—my heart was so full of grief. And it came out in
the picture.’ –TAMI SILICIO

By April 2004, some 700 U.S. troops had been killed on the battlefield in Iraq,
but images of the dead returning home in coffins were never seen. The U.S.
government had banned news organizations from photographing such scenes in
1991, arguing that they violated families’ privacy and the dignity of the dead. To
critics, the policy was simply a way of sanitizing an increasingly bloody conflict.
As a government contractor working for a cargo company in Kuwait, Tami
Silicio was moved by the increasingly human freight she was loading and felt
compelled to share what she was seeing. On April 7, Silicio used her Nikon
Coolpix to photograph more than 20 flag-draped coffins as they passed through
Kuwait on their way to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. She emailed the
picture to a friend in the U.S., who forwarded it to a photo editor at the Seattle
Times. With Silicio’s permission, the Times put the photo on its front page on
April 18—and immediately set off a firestorm. Within days, Silicio was fired
from her job and a debate raged over the ethics of publishing the images. While
the government claimed that families of troops killed in action agreed with its
policy, many felt that the pictures should not be censored. In late 2009, during
President Barack Obama’s first year in office, the Pentagon lifted the ban.
IRAQI GIRL AT CHECKPOINT | Chris Hondros, 2005

‘As much as that happens in Iraq, it almost never gets photographed, and so I did
realize I was onto an important set of pictures.’ –CHRIS HONDROS

Moments before American photojournalist Chris Hondros took this picture of

Samar Hassan, the little girl was in the backseat of her family’s car as they drove
home from the Iraqi city of Tall ‘Afar. Now Samar was an orphan, her parents
shot dead by U.S. soldiers who had opened fire because they feared the car
might be carrying insurgents or a suicide bomber. It was January 2005, and the
war in Iraq was at its most brutal. Such horrific accidents were not rare in that
chaotic conflict, but they had never been documented in real time. Hondros, who
worked for Getty Images, was embedded with the Army unit when the shooting
happened. He transmitted his photographs immediately, and by the following
day they were published around the world. The images led the U.S. military to
revise its checkpoint procedures, but their greater effect was in compelling an
already skeptical public to ask why American soldiers were killing the people
they had ostensibly come to liberate and protect.
Hondros was killed during the civil war in Libya in 2011.
GORILLA IN THE CONGO | Brent Stirton, 2007

‘This wasn’t random, this was planned.’ –BRENT STIRTON

Senkwekwe the silverback mountain gorilla weighed at least 500 pounds when
his carcass was strapped to a makeshift stretcher, and it took more than a dozen
men to hoist it into the air. Brent Stirton captured the scene while in Virunga
National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Senkwekwe and several
other gorillas were shot dead as a violent conflict engulfed the park, where half
the world’s critically endangered mountain gorillas live.
When Stirton photographed residents and park rangers respectfully carrying
Senkwekwe out of the forest in 2007, the park was under siege by people
illegally harvesting wood to be used in a charcoal industry that grew in the wake
of the Rwandan genocide. In the photo, Senkwekwe looks huge but vaguely
human, a reminder that conflict in Central Africa affects more than just the
humans caught in its cross fire; it also touches the region’s environment and
animal inhabitants. Three months after Stirton’s photograph was published in
Newsweek, nine African countries—including Congo—signed a legally binding
treaty to help protect the mountain gorillas in Virunga.
THE SITUATION ROOM | Pete Souza, 2011

‘This was the longest 40 minutes of my life.’ –BARACK OBAMA

Official White House photographers document Presidents at play and at work,

on the phone with world leaders and presiding over Oval Office meetings. But
sometimes the unique access allows them to capture watershed moments that
become our collective memory. On May 1, 2011, Pete Souza was inside the
Situation Room as U.S. forces raided Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound
and killed the terrorist leader. Yet Souza’s picture includes neither the raid nor
bin Laden. Instead he captured those watching the secret operation in real time.
President Barack Obama made the decision to launch the attack, but like
everyone else in the room, he is a mere spectator to its execution. He stares,
brow furrowed, at the raid unfolding on monitors. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton covers her mouth, waiting to see its outcome.
In a national address that evening from the White House, Obama announced
that bin Laden had been killed. Photographs of the dead body have never been
released, leaving Souza’s photo and the tension it captured as the only public
image of the moment the war on terror notched its most important victory.
 INNOVATION
Art and science—though sometimes sketched as opposites—are really two
volumes in the same marvelous book. Both express the human longing to share
what we see, in the world and in our imaginations.
Photography began as chemistry. Light will leave its mark indefinitely in
certain compounds. First using asphalt, then switching to silver in the presence
of iodine and mercury, Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis-Jacques-
Mandé Daguerre, working in the 1820s and ’30s, preserved the visible character
of photons as they reflected off physical objects.
But the chemists were also craftsmen. Even in Daguerre’s earliest pictures,
artistic principles of composition and form were on display. Early portrait
photographers, like Mathew Brady and Julia Margaret Cameron, consciously
shared the traditions of painters like Jan van Eyck and John Singer Sargent.
No other art has drawn on such rapid scientific innovation. As media for
capturing images evolved and improved, from copper plates to sheets of glass to
celluloid rolls to silicon, photography became portable and inexpensive. Faster
shutters and higher film speeds made it possible to freeze motion—and to make
motion pictures. First in the darkroom, and now with digital tools, photographers
learned to layer their pictures with artistic interpretation. Cameras that record
light beyond the visible spectrum have shown us both the world inside our own
bodies and the nebulae of incomprehensibly distant galaxies.
Now photography is rapidly becoming the first art that every human being
will engage in. What started in 1900, when George Eastman introduced the first
Kodak Brownie camera, has accelerated exponentially with the invention of the
smartphone. Can the art keep up with the science? In the days before
photography, William Blake exhorted: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, and
Heaven in a Wild Flower.” It is a task for the human eye and spirit, and the
camera is but a tool.
VIEW FROM THE WINDOW AT LE GRA | Joseph Nicéphore
Niépce, circa 1826

‘The discovery I have made and which I call Heliography, consists in

reproducing spontaneously, by the action of light.’ –JOSEPH NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE

It took a unique combination of ingenuity and curiosity to produce the first

known photograph, so it’s fitting that the man who made it was an inventor and
not an artist. In the 1820s, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce had become fascinated with
the printing method of lithography, in which images drawn on stone could be
reproduced using oil-based ink. Searching for other ways to produce images,
Niépce set up a device called a camera obscura, which captured and projected
scenes illuminated by sunlight, and trained it on the view outside his studio
window in eastern France. The scene was cast on a treated pewter plate that,
after many hours, retained a crude copy of the buildings and rooftops outside.
The result was the first known permanent photograph.
It is no overstatement to say that Niépce’s achievement laid the groundwork
for the development of photography. Later, he worked with artist Louis
Daguerre, whose sharper daguerreotype images marked photography’s next
major advancement.
BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE | Louis Daguerre, 1839

‘I have seized the fleeting light and imprisoned it. I have forced the sun to paint
pictures for me.’ –LOUIS-JACQUES-MANDé DAGUERRE

The shoe shiner working on Paris’ Boulevard du Temple one spring day in 1839
had no idea he would make history. But Louis Daguerre’s groundbreaking image
of the man and a customer is the first known instance of human beings captured
in a photograph. Before Daguerre, people had only been represented in artworks.
That changed when Daguerre fixed his lens on a Paris street and then exposed a
silver-plated sheet of copper for several minutes (though others came into the
frame, they did not stay long enough to be captured), developed and fixed the
image using chemicals. The result was the first mirror-image photograph.
Unlike earlier efforts, daguerreotypes were sharp and permanent. And though
they were eventually outpaced by newer innovations—daguerreotypes were not
reproducible, nor could they be printed on paper—Daguerre did more than
perhaps anyone else to show the vast potential of the new medium of
photography.
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH | Roger Fenton, 1855

‘Men will fall before the battle scythe of war, but not before this infallible
sketcher has caught their lineaments and given them an anonymous immortality.’
–REVIEW OF ‘PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE CRIMEA,’ATHENAEUM, SEPTEMBER 1855

While little is remembered of the Crimean War—that nearly three-year conflict

that pitted England, France, Turkey and Sardinia-Piedmont against Russia—
coverage of it radically changed the way we view war. Until then, the general
public learned of battles through heroic paintings and illustrations. But after the
British photographer Roger Fenton landed in 1855 on that far-off peninsula on
the Black Sea, he sent back revelatory views of the conflict that firmly
established the tradition of war photography. Those 360 photos of camp life and
men manning mortar batteries may lack the visceral brutality we have since
become accustomed to, yet Fenton’s work showed that this new artistic medium
could rival the fine arts. This is especially clear in The Valley of the Shadow of
Death, which shows a cannonball-strewn gully not far from the spot
immortalized in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
That haunting image, which for many evokes the poem’s “Cannon to right of
them,/ Cannon to left of them,/ Cannon in front of them” as the troops race “into
the valley of Death,” also revealed to the general public the reality of the lifeless
desolation left in the wake of senseless slaughter. Scholars long believed that this
was Fenton’s only image of the valley. But a second version with fewer of the
scattered projectiles turned up in 1981, fueling a fierce debate over which came
first. That the more recently discovered picture is thought to be the first indicates
that Fenton may have been one of the earliest to stage a news photograph.
THE HORSE IN MOTION | Eadweard Muybridge, 1878

‘We think the representation to be unimpeachable, until we throw all our

preconceived impressions on one side, and seek the truth by independent
observations from Nature herself.’ –EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

When a horse trots or gallops, does it ever become fully airborne? This was the
question photographer Eadweard Muybridge set out to answer in 1878. Railroad
tycoon and former California governor Leland Stanford was convinced the
answer was yes and commissioned Muybridge to provide proof. Muybridge
developed a way to take photos with an exposure lasting a fraction of a second
and, with reporters as witnesses, arranged 12 cameras along a track on Stanford’s
estate.
As a horse sped by, it tripped wires connected to the cameras, which took 12
photos in rapid succession. Muybridge developed the images on site and, in the
frames, revealed that a horse is completely aloft with its hooves tucked
underneath it for a brief moment during a stride. The revelation, imperceptible to
the naked eye but apparent through photography, marked a new purpose for the
medium. It could capture truth through technology. Muybridge’s stop-motion
technique was an early form of animation that helped pave the way for the
motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.
BANDIT’S ROOST, 59½ MULBERRY STREET | Jacob Riis, circa
1888

‘Hence, I say, in the battle with the slum we win or we perish. There is no
middle way.’ –JACOB RIIS

Late 19th-century New York City was a magnet for the world’s immigrants, and
the vast majority of them found not streets paved with gold but nearly subhuman
squalor. While polite society turned a blind eye, brave reporters like the Danish-
born Jacob Riis documented this shame of the Gilded Age. Riis did this by
venturing into the city’s most ominous neighborhoods with his blinding
magnesium flash powder lights, capturing the casual crime, grinding poverty and
frightful overcrowding. Most famous of these was Riis’ image of a Lower East
Side street gang, which conveys the danger that lurked around every bend. Such
work became the basis of his revelatory book How the Other Half Lives, which
forced Americans to confront what they had long ignored and galvanized
reformers like the young New York politician Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote to
the photographer, “I have read your book, and I have come to help.” Riis’ work
was instrumental in bringing about New York State’s landmark Tenement House
Act of 1901, which improved conditions for the poor. And his crusading
approach and direct, confrontational style ushered in the age of documentary and
muckraking photojournalism.
THE HAND OF MRS. WILHELM RöNTGEN | Wilhelm Conrad
Röntgen, 1895

‘I did not think; I investigated.’ –DR. WILHELM CONRAD RöNTGEN

There’s no way of knowing how many pictures were taken of Anna Bertha
Röntgen, and most are surely lost to history. But one of them isn’t: it is of her
hand—more precisely, the bones in her hand—an image captured by her
husband Wilhelm when he took the first medical x-ray in 1895. Wilhelm had
spent weeks working in his lab, experimenting with a cathode tube that emitted
different frequencies of electromagnetic energy. Some, he noticed, appeared to
penetrate solid objects and expose sheets of photographic paper. He used the
strange rays, which he aptly dubbed x-rays, to create shadowy images of the
inside of various inanimate objects and then, finally, one very animate one. The
picture of Anna’s hand created a sensation, and the discovery of x-rays won
Wilhelm the first Nobel Prize ever granted for physics in 1901. His breakthrough
quickly went into use around the world, revolutionizing the diagnosis and
treatment of injuries and illnesses that had always been hidden from sight. Anna,
however, was never taken with the picture. “I have seen my death,” she said
when she first glimpsed it. For many millions of other people, it has meant life.
MOONLIGHT: THE POND | Edward Steichen, 1904

‘In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish.’ –EDWARD STEICHEN

Is Edward Steichen’s ethereal image a photograph or a painting? It’s both, and

that was exactly his point. Steichen photographed the wooded scene in
Mamaroneck, N.Y., hand-colored the black-and-white prints with blue tones and
may have even added the glowing moon. The blurring of two mediums was the
aim of Pictorialism, which was embraced by professional photographers at the
turn of the 20th century as a way to differentiate their work from amateur
snapshots taken with newly available handheld cameras. And no single image
was more formative than Moonlight.
The year before he created Moonlight, Steichen wrote an essay arguing that
altering photos was no different than choosing when and where to click the
shutter. Photographers, he said, always have a perspective that necessarily
distorts the authenticity of their images. Although Steichen eventually
abandoned Pictorialism, the movement’s influence can be seen in every
photographer who seeks to create scenes, not merely capture them. Moonlight,
too, continues to resonate. A century after Steichen made the image, a print sold
for nearly $3 million.
BLIND | Paul Strand, 1916

‘I felt they were all people whom life had battered into some sort of
extraordinary interest and, in a way, nobility.’ –PAUL STRAND

Even if she could see, the woman in Paul Strand’s pioneering image might not
have known she was being photographed. Strand wanted to capture people as
they were, not as they projected themselves to be, and so when documenting
immigrants on New York City’s Lower East Side, he used a false lens that
allowed him to shoot in one direction even as his large camera was pointed in
another. The result feels spontaneous and honest, a radical departure from the
era’s formal portraits of people in stilted poses. Strand’s photograph of the blind
woman, who he said was selling newspapers on the street, is candid, with the
woman’s face turned away from the camera. But Strand’s work did more than
offer an unflinching look at a moment when the nation was being reshaped by a
surge of immigrants. By depicting subjects without their knowledge—or consent
—and using their images to promote social awareness, Strand helped pave the
way for an entirely new form of documentary art: street photography.
BRICKLAYER | August Sander, 1928

‘Making true portraits of people is how we can create a mirror of the times in
which they live.’ –AUGUST SANDER

There is a certain formulaic approach to August Sander’s photography. But that

was his aim. By presenting doctors, farmers, chefs and beggars all with the same
stark directness, the German-born Sander made everyone the everyman. He set
out to show that there is much to learn from all layers of society, noting, “We can
tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his
face whether he is happy or troubled, for life unavoidably leaves its trace there.”
Sander’s most celebrated portrait, of a bricklayer in Cologne, Germany,
embodies that insight. For while the laborer’s work entails toil and sweat, he
maintains a proud bearing. The classical framing, with the lines of the bricks
evoking the lines of the bricklayer’s vest, reinforces the dignity of the subject.
Which was no small thing for a nation still reeling from the humiliation of World
War I. Sander gathered Bricklayer and his other portraits in the monumental
People of the 20th Century, the first body of work to document a culture through
photography. Sander’s photographs celebrate the importance of the individual,
elevating portraiture of ordinary people to art.
THE HAGUE | Erich Salomon, 1930

‘What’s a meeting that isn’t photographed by Salomon? People won’t believe it’s
important at all!’ –ARISTIDE BRIAND, PRIME MINISTER OF FRANCE

Portly statesmen have long gathered to weigh the fate of nations, cigars and
brandy at the ready. But they were always sequestered far from prying eyes. The
German photojournalist Erich Salomon changed all that, slipping into those
smoke-filled back rooms with a small Leica camera built to shoot in low light.
Nowhere was his skill on greater display than during a 1930 meeting in the
Hague over German World War I reparations. There, at 2 a.m., Salomon
candidly shot exhausted Foreign Ministers after a long day of negotiations. The
picture created a sensation when it was published in the London Graphic. For the
first time, the public could look through the doors of power and see world
leaders with their guard down. Salomon, who died in Auschwitz 12 years later,
had created backstage political photojournalism.
BEHIND THE GARE SAINT-LAZARE | Henri Cartier-Bresson,
1932

‘Photography is just luck. There was a fence, and I poked my camera through the
fence. It’s a fraction of a second.’ –HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

Speed and instinct were at the heart of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s brilliance as a

photographer. And never did he combine the two better than on the day in 1932
when he pointed his Leica camera through a fence behind Paris’ Saint-Lazare
train station. The resulting image is a masterpiece of form and light. As a man
leaps across the water, evoking the dancers in a poster on the wall behind him,
the ripples in the puddle around the ladder mimic the curved metal pieces
nearby. Cartier-Bresson, shooting with a nimble 35-millimeter camera and no
flash, saw these components all come together for a brief moment and clicked
his shutter. Timing is everything, and no other photographer’s was better. The
image would become the quintessential example of Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive
Moment,” his lyrical term for the ability to immortalize a fleeting scene on film.
It was a fast, mobile, detail-obsessed style that would help chart the course for
all of modern photography.
THE LOCH NESS MONSTER | Unknown, 1934

‘All right, we’ll give them their monster.’ –MARMADUKE WETHERELL

If the giraffe never existed, we’d have to invent it. It’s our nature to grow bored
with the improbable but real and look for the impossible. So it is with the photo
of what was said to be the Loch Ness monster, purportedly taken by British
doctor Robert Wilson in April 1934. Wilson, however, had simply been enlisted
to cover up an earlier fraud by wild-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, who
had been sent to Scotland by London’s Daily Mail to bag the monster. There
being no monster to bag, Wetherell brought home photos of hippo prints that he
said belonged to Nessie. The Mail caught wise and discredited Wetherell, who
then returned to the loch with a monster made out of a toy submarine. He and his
son used Wilson, a respected physician, to lend the hoax credibility. The Mail
endures; Wilson’s reputation doesn’t.
The Loch Ness image is something of a lodestone for conspiracy theorists
and fable seekers, as is the absolutely authentic picture of the famous face on
Mars taken by the Viking probe in 1976. The thrill of that find lasted only until
1998, when the Mars Global Surveyor proved the face was, as NASA said, a
topographic formation, one that by that time had been nearly windblown away.
We were innocents in those sweet, pre-Photoshop days. Now we know better—
and we trust nothing. The art of the fake has advanced, but the charm of it, like
the Martian face, is all but gone.
THE FALLING SOLDIER | Robert Capa, 1936

‘That camera, which I held above my head, just caught a man at the moment
when he was shot. That was probably the best picture I ever took.’ –ROBERT CAPA

Robert Capa made his seminal photograph of the Spanish Civil War without ever
looking through his viewfinder. Widely considered one of the best combat
photographs ever made, and the first to show battlefield death in action, Capa
said in a 1947 radio interview that he was in the trenches with Republican
militiamen. The men would pop aboveground to charge and fire old rifles at a
machine gun manned by troops loyal to Francisco Franco. Each time, the
militiamen would get gunned down. During one charge, Capa held his camera
above his head and clicked the shutter. The result is an image that is full of
drama and movement as the shot soldier tumbles backward.
In the 1970s, decades after it was published in the French magazine Vu and
LIFE, a South African journalist named O.D. Gallagher claimed that Capa had
told him the image was staged. But no confirmation was ever presented, and
most believe that Capa’s is a genuine candid photograph of a Spanish militiaman
being shot. Capa’s image elevated war photography to a new level long before
journalists were formally embedded with combat troops, showing how crucial, if
dangerous, it is for photographers to be in the middle of the action.
DALí ATOMICUS | Philippe Halsman, 1948

‘Before there was Photoshop, there was Philippe.’ –IRENE HALSMAN, DAUGHTER OF
PHILIPPE HALSMAN

Capturing the essence of those he photographed was Philippe Halsman’s life’s

work. So when Halsman set out to shoot his friend and longtime collaborator the
Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, he knew a simple seated portrait would not
suffice. Inspired by Dalí’s painting Leda Atomica, Halsman created an elaborate
scene to surround the artist that included the original work, a floating chair and
an in-progress easel suspended by thin wires. Assistants, including Halsman’s
wife and young daughter Irene, stood out of the frame and, on the
photographer’s count, threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air while
Dalí leaped up. It took the assembled cast 26 takes to capture a composition that
satisfied Halsman. And no wonder. The final result, published in LIFE, evokes
Dalí’s own work. The artist even painted an image directly onto the print before
publication.
Before Halsman, portrait photography was often stilted and softly blurred,
with a clear sense of detachment between the photographer and the subject.
Halsman’s approach, to bring subjects such as Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe
and Alfred Hitchcock into sharp focus as they moved before the camera,
redefined portrait photography and inspired generations of photographers to
collaborate with their subjects.
TROLLEY—NEW ORLEANS | Robert Frank, 1955

‘With one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.’ –JACK
KEROUAC, INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICANS

Uncomfortable truths tend to carry consequences for the teller. When Robert
Frank’s book The Americans was released, Practical Photography magazine
dismissed the Swiss-born photographer’s work as a collection of “meaningless
blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.” The
book’s 83 images were taken as Frank crisscrossed the U.S. on several road trips
in the mid-1950s, and they captured a country on the cusp of change: rigidly
segregated but with the civil rights movement stirring, rooted in family and rural
tradition yet moving headlong into the anonymity of urban life.
Nowhere is this tension higher than in Trolley—New Orleans, a fleeting
moment that conveys the brutal social order of postwar America. The picture,
shot a few weeks before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in
Montgomery, Ala., was unplanned. Frank was shooting a street parade when he
saw the trolley passing. Spinning around, Frank raised his camera and shot just
before the trolley disappeared from view. The picture was used on the cover of
early editions of The Americans, fueling criticism that the work was anti-
American. Of course Frank—who became a U.S. citizen in 1963, five years after
The Americans was published—simply saw his adopted country as it was, not as
it imagined itself to be. Half a century later, that candor has made The
Americans a monument of documentary and street photography. Frank’s loose
and subjective style liberated the form from the conventions of photojournalism
established by LIFE magazine, which he dismissed as “goddamned stories with a
beginning and an end.”
MILK DROP CORONET | Harold Edgerton, 1957

‘Seconds. There it is. Sometimes it’s no use at all. Sometimes it’s tremendous
value.’ –HAROLD EDGERTON

Before Harold Edgerton rigged a milk dropper next to a timer and a camera of
his own invention, it was virtually impossible to take a good photo in the dark
without bulky equipment. It was similarly futile to try to photograph a fleeting
moment. But in the 1950s at his lab at MIT, Edgerton started tinkering with a
process that would change the future of photography. There the electrical-
engineering professor combined high-tech strobe lights with camera shutter
motors to capture moments imperceptible to the naked eye. Milk Drop Coronet,
his revolutionary stop-motion photograph, freezes the impact of a drop of milk
on a table, a crown of liquid discernible to the camera for only a millisecond.
The picture proved that photography could advance human understanding of the
physical world, and the technology Edgerton used to take it laid the foundation
for the modern electronic flash.
Edgerton worked for years to perfect his milk-drop photographs, many of
which were black and white; one version was featured in the first photography
exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1937. And while the
man known as Doc captured other blink-and-you-missed-it moments, like
balloons bursting and a bullet piercing an apple, his milk drop remains a
quintessential example of photography’s ability to make art out of evidence.
FETUS, 18 WEEKS | Lennart Nilsson, 1965

‘We try to create or see something, which has not been known before.’ –LENNART
NILSSON

When LIFE published Lennart Nilsson’s photo essay “Drama of Life Before
Birth” in 1965, the issue was so popular that it sold out within days. And for
good reason. Nilsson’s images publicly revealed for the first time what a
developing fetus looks like, and in the process raised pointed new questions
about when life begins. In the accompanying story, LIFE explained that all but
one of the fetuses pictured were photographed outside the womb and had been
removed—or aborted—“for a variety of medical reasons.” Nilsson had struck a
deal with a hospital in Stockholm, whose doctors called him whenever a fetus
was available to photograph. There, in a dedicated room with lights and lenses
specially designed for the project, Nilsson arranged the fetuses so they appeared
to be floating as if in the womb.
In the years since Nilsson’s essay was published, the images have been
widely appropriated without his permission. Antiabortion activists in particular
have used them to advance their cause. (Nilsson has never taken a public stand
on abortion.) Still, decades after they first appeared, Nilsson’s images endure for
their unprecedentedly clear, detailed view of human life at its earliest stages.
EARTHRISE | William Anders, NASA, 1968

‘It was the first time that people actually knew what the Earth looked like.’
–WILLIAM ANDERS

It’s never easy to identify the moment a hinge turns in history. When it comes to
humanity’s first true grasp of the beauty, fragility and loneliness of our world,
however, we know the precise instant. It was on December 24, 1968, exactly 75
hours, 48 minutes and 41 seconds after the Apollo 8 spacecraft lifted off from
Cape Canaveral en route to becoming the first manned mission to orbit the
moon. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders entered lunar orbit
on Christmas Eve of what had been a bloody, war-torn year for America. At the
beginning of the fourth of 10 orbits, their spacecraft was emerging from the far
side of the moon when a view of the blue-white planet filled one of the hatch
windows. “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth
coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” Anders exclaimed. He snapped a picture—in
black and white. Lovell scrambled to find a color canister. “Well, I think we
missed it,” Anders said. Lovell looked through windows three and four. “Hey, I
got it right here!” he exclaimed. A weightless Anders shot to where Lovell was
floating and fired his Hasselblad. “You got it?” Lovell asked. “Yep,” Anders
answered. The image—our first full-color view of our planet from off of it—
helped to launch the environmental movement. And, just as important, it helped
human beings recognize that in a cold and punishing cosmos, we’ve got it pretty
good.
UNTITLED FILM STILL #21 | Cindy Sherman, 1978

‘She was one of the first image-makers who worked exclusively in the medium
to be called an artist rather than a photographer.’ –MARY LOU MARIEN, ART
HISTORIAN

Since she burst onto the art scene in the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman the person
has always been obscured by Cindy Sherman the subject. Through inventive,
deliberately confusing self-portraits taken in familiar but artificial circumstances,
Sherman introduced photography as postmodern performance art. From her
Untitled Film Stills series, #21 (“City Girl”) calls to mind a frame from a B
movie or an opening scene from a long-since-canceled television show. Yet the
images are entirely Sherman’s creations, placing the viewer in the role of
unwitting voyeur. Rather than capture real life in the click of a shutter, Sherman
uses photography as an artistic tool to deceive and captivate. Her images have
become some of the most valuable photographs ever produced. By manipulating
viewers and recasting her own identity, Sherman carved out a new place for
photography in fine art. And she showed that even photography allows people to
be something they’re not.
BRIAN RIDLEY AND LYLE HEETER | Robert Mapplethorpe,
1979

‘I see things like they’ve never been seen before.’ –ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

Mainstream American culture had little room for homosexuality in 1979, when
Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter in their full
sadomasochistic regalia. At work, gay employees were largely closeted. In many
states, expressing their love could be criminal. Mapplethorpe spent 10 years
during this era documenting the underground gay S&M scene—a world even
more deeply shielded from public view. His intimate, highly stylized portraits
threw it into open relief, perhaps none more so than Brian Ridley and Lyle
Heeter. Both men are clad in leather, with the submissive one bound by chains
and the dominant partner holding his reins in one hand and a riding crop in the
other. Yet the men are posed in an otherwise unremarkable living room, a
juxtaposition that adds a layer of normality to a relationship far outside the
bounds of what most Americans then considered acceptable. The picture and the
series it was part of blew open the doors for a range of photographers and artists
to frankly examine gay life and sexuality.
Nearly a decade later, Mapplethorpe’s work continued to provoke. An exhibit
featuring his pictures of gay S&M scenes led to a Cincinnati art museum and its
director’s getting charged with obscenity. (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989,
one year before the trial began.) The museum and its director were eventually
acquitted, bolstering Mapplethorpe’s legacy as a bold pioneer whose work
deserved public display.
ANDROGYNY (6 MEN + 6 WOMEN) | Nancy Burson, 1982

‘I really was, in a certain way, more interested in showing people what they
could not see rather than what they could see.’ –NANCY BURSON

Photography is a perfect medium for recording the past. But until Nancy
Burson’s Androgyny, it was useless for predicting the future. Two decades
before the shape-shifting enabled by digital photography became ubiquitous,
Burson worked with MIT scientists to develop technology that let her craft this
composite image of the faces of six men and six women. The effect was
revolutionary. Photographs could suddenly be used to project how someone
would look, not just how they once did. Burson’s composite work led her to
develop pioneering software that could digitally age faces—the first time these
images could be based on more than guesses. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation acquired Burson’s software to create present-day images of people
who had gone missing years earlier, and it has been used to locate numerous
missing persons.
IMMERSIONS (PISS CHRIST) | Andres Serrano, 1987

‘Freedom of religion and freedom of expression have something in common:

they both have the power to polarize people.’ –ANDRES SERRANO

Andres Serrano said he did not intend his 1987 photograph of a crucifix
submerged in his own urine to offend; indeed, when it was first displayed in
galleries, no one protested. But in 1989, after Piss Christ was exhibited in
Virginia, it attracted the attention of an outspoken pastor and, soon after, of
Congress. Angry that Serrano had received funding from the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Senators Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms helped
pass a law requiring the NEA to consider “general standards of decency” in
awarding grants. The uproar turned Piss Christ into one of the key fronts in the
culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, alongside the work of Serrano’s fellow
NEA recipient Robert Mapplethorpe, and divided a nation over the question of
whether the government had the right to censor art.
The battle over Piss Christ has left a dual legacy. The campaign to place the
picture outside the boundaries of acceptable art contributed to its fame, inspiring
other artists to push limits even further. But those provocateurs are less likely to
do so with help from the government: the decency-standards law passed because
of Piss Christ was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1998.
UNTITLED (COWBOY) | Richard Prince, 1989

‘I was trying to avoid any reference to the fact that I was actually copying a page
from a magazine, or the dot pattern, the printed quality. I was trying to make the
photograph as much mine as possible.’ –RICHARD PRINCE

The idea for the project that would challenge everything sacred about ownership
in photography came to Richard Prince when he was working in the tear-sheet
department at Time Inc. While he deconstructed the pages of magazines for the
archives, Prince’s attention was drawn to the ads that appeared alongside
articles. One ad in particular caught his eye: the macho image of the Marlboro
Man riding a horse under blue skies. And so, in a process he came to call
rephotography, Prince took pictures of the ads and cropped out the type, leaving
only the iconic cowboy and his surroundings. That Prince didn’t take the original
picture meant little to collectors. In 2005 Untitled (Cowboy) sold for $1.2
million at auction, then the highest publicly recorded price for the sale of a
contemporary photograph.
Others were less enthusiastic. Prince was sued by a photographer for using
copyrighted images, but the courts ruled largely in Prince’s favor. That wasn’t
his only victory. Prince’s rephotography helped to create a new art form—
photography of photography—that foreshadowed the era of digital sharing and
upended our understanding of a photo’s authenticity and ownership.
PILLARS OF CREATION | NASA, 1995

‘As long as there have been people, we have been drawn by this question of
what is our connection with the sky.’ –DR. JEFF HESTER, HUBBLE ASTRONOMER

The Hubble Space Telescope almost didn’t make it. Carried aloft in 1990 aboard
the space shuttle Atlantis, it was over-budget, years behind schedule and, when it
finally reached orbit, nearsighted, its 8-foot mirror distorted as a result of a
manufacturing flaw. It would not be until 1993 that a repair mission would bring
Hubble online. Finally, on April 1, 1995, the telescope delivered the goods,
capturing an image of the universe so clear and deep that it has come to be
known as Pillars of Creation. What Hubble photographed is the Eagle Nebula, a
star-forming patch of space 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation
Serpens Cauda. The great smokestacks are vast clouds of interstellar dust,
shaped by the high-energy winds blowing out from nearby stars (the black
portion in the top right is from the magnification of one of Hubble’s four
cameras). But the science of the pillars has been the lesser part of their
significance. Both the oddness and the enormousness of the formation—the
pillars are 5 light-years, or 30 trillion miles, long—awed, thrilled and humbled in
equal measure. One image achieved what a thousand astronomy symposia never
could.
FIRST CELL-PHONE PICTURE | Philippe Kahn, 1997

‘The camera phone was born in Santa Cruz on June 11, 1997, at the Sutter
Maternity Clinic.’ –PHILIPPE KAHN

Boredom can be a powerful incentive. In 1997, Philippe Kahn was stuck in a

Northern California maternity ward with nothing to do. The software
entrepreneur had been shooed away by his wife while she birthed their daughter,
Sophie. So Kahn, who had been tinkering with technologies that share images
instantly, jerry-built a device that could send a photo of his newborn to friends
and family—in real time. Like any invention, the setup was crude: a digital
camera connected to his flip-top cell phone, synched by a few lines of code he’d
written on his laptop in the hospital. But the effect has transformed the world:
Kahn’s device captured his daughter’s first moments and transmitted them
instantly to more than 2,000 people.
Kahn soon refined his ad hoc prototype, and in 2000 Sharp used his
technology to release the first commercially available integrated camera phone,
in Japan. The phones were introduced to the U.S. market a few years later and
soon became ubiquitous. Kahn’s invention forever altered how we communicate,
perceive and experience the world and laid the groundwork for smartphones and
photo-sharing applications like Instagram and Snapchat. Phones are now used to
send hundreds of millions of images around the world every day—including a
fair number of baby pictures.
99 CENT | Andreas Gursky, 1999

‘The size of the work affects its reception, offering two different experiences:
one immersive, one intimate.’ –ANDREAS GURSKY

It may seem ironic that a photograph of cheap goods would set a record for the
most expensive contemporary photograph ever sold, but Andreas Gursky’s 99
Cent is far more than a visual inventory. In a single large-scale image digitally
stitched together from multiple images taken in a 99 Cents Only store in Los
Angeles, the seemingly endless rows of stuff, with shoppers’ heads floating
anonymously above the merchandise, more closely resemble abstract or
Impressionist painting than contemporary photography. Which was precisely
Gursky’s point. From the Tokyo stock exchange to a Mexico City landfill, the
German architect and photographer uses digital manipulation and a distinct sense
of composition to turn everyday experiences into art. As the curator Peter
Galassi wrote in the catalog for a 2001 retrospective of Gursky’s work at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City, “High art versus commerce,
conceptual rigor versus spontaneous observation, photography versus painting ...
for Gursky they are all givens—not opponents but companions.” That ability to
render the man-made and mundane with fresh eyes has helped modern
photography enter the art world’s elite. In 2006, in the heady days before the
Great Recession, 99 Cent sold for $2.3 million at auction. The record for a
contemporary photograph has since been surpassed, but the sale did more than
any other to catapult modern photography into the pages of auction catalogs
alongside the oil paintings and marble sculptures by old masters.
THE DEATH OF NEDA | Unknown, 2009

‘It’s heartbreaking, and I think that anybody who sees it knows that there’s
something fundamentally unjust.’ –U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

Neda Agha-Soltan was an unlikely viral icon. On June 20, 2009, the 26-year-old
stepped out of her car on a Tehran street near where Iranians were massing in
protest of what was seen as the farcical re-election of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. The Islamic Republic was experiencing its worst unrest since the
1979 revolution. The state made it illegal to join the demonstrations and barred
most foreign media, which meant the burden of bearing witness was largely left
to the citizens who waded in, cell phones in hand. It was around 6:30 p.m. when
Agha-Soltan was struck in the chest by a single bullet, said to originate from a
progovernment sniper, though no one was ever charged. Men struggled to save
her as others focused their cameras on the unfolding tragedy. One frame from the
footage freezes her final gaze as streaks of deep red formed a web on her face.
The image, among the earliest and easily the most significant to ever go viral,
commanded the world’s attention. Within hours, footage uploaded anonymously
to YouTube had been viewed by the President of the United States—proof that
our new digital age could not only connect people; it could pry open even the
staunchest of regimes.
NORTH KOREA | David Guttenfelder, 2013

‘When they opened up the 3G network for foreigners, everything changed.’

–DAVID GUTTENFELDER

David Guttenfelder was chief photographer in Asia for the Associated Press
when it became the first international news organization to open a bureau in
North Korea. He started making frequent trips to the country, which had been
largely off-limits to foreign journalists and virtually hidden from public view for
nearly 60 years. Guttenfelder dutifully chronicled the official events and stage-
managed pageants in Pyongyang, but his eye kept wandering to the scenes of
daily life just beyond the guided tours. In early 2013, North Korea made a 3G
connection available to foreigners, and suddenly Guttenfelder had the ability to
share those glimpses with the world in real time. On January 18, 2013, he used
his iPhone to post one of the first images to Instagram from inside the
notoriously secretive country. “The window [into] North Korea has opened
another crack,” he wrote on his widely followed account. “Meanwhile, for
Koreans here who will not have access to the same service, the window remains
shut.” By using the emerging technology of the sharing age, Guttenfelder opened
one of the world’s most closed societies. He also inspired other visiting
foreigners to do the same, creating a portrait of the monotony of everyday life
not visible in mainstream coverage of the totalitarian state and bringing the
outside world its clearest picture yet of North Korea.
OSCARS SELFIE | Bradley Cooper, 2014

‘It was this incredible moment of spontaneity that I will never forget. And thanks
to the selfie, neither will anyone else.’ –ELLEN DEGENERES

It was a moment made for the celebrity-saturated Internet age. In the middle of
the 2014 Oscars, host Ellen DeGeneres waded into the crowd and corralled some
of the world’s biggest stars to squeeze in for a selfie. As Bradley Cooper held the
phone, Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence and Kevin Spacey, among
others, pressed their faces together and mugged. But it was what DeGeneres did
next that turned a bit of Hollywood levity into a transformational image. After
Cooper took the picture, DeGeneres immediately posted it on Twitter, where it
was retweeted over 3 million times, more than any other photo in history.
It was also an enviable advertising coup for Samsung. DeGeneres used the
company’s phone for the stunt, and the brand was prominently displayed in the
program’s televised “selfie moment.” Samsung has been coy about the extent of
the planning, but its public relations firm acknowledged its value could be as
high as $1 billion. That would never have been the case were it not for the
incredible speed and ease with which images can now spread around the world.
 A PICTURE’S WORTH
David Von Drehle

Photography was scarcely 30 years old when Roger Fenton, a well-

born Englishman, landed on the Crimean Peninsula with camera equipment and
a wagonload of darkroom supplies. He spent most of the next four months
documenting a dreadful war among European powers, the war that gave the
world Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade.
One day in 1855, in a sloping declivity near Sebastopol known as the Valley
of the Shadow of Death, among cannonballs scattered by the frequent Russian
artillery barrages that gave the valley its nickname, Fenton spent the better part
of two hours recording two pictures of the scene.
These stark and ominous images are widely regarded as the first important
war photography. But in recent years they have been at the root of an intense
controversy. After taking the first exposure, Fenton caused a number of
cannonballs to be moved from the hillside and placed in the road. Why he did
this is not clear.
The late critic Susan Sontag theorized that Fenton was sensationalizing the
scene by making the road look more dangerous. Filmmaker Errol Morris, among
others, has taken a more forgiving view. Perhaps Fenton was attempting to show
the scene as it was immediately after a barrage, before the road was cleared.
 What difference does it make? The controversy is a testament to the enduring
power of a great photograph. One might imagine that a photograph would be the
most ephemeral of documents. It is, after all, only the record of light reflected in
a fleeting moment. But as this collection shows, the opposite is the case. An
influential photograph retains its power long after eyewitnesses are gone and
written accounts have been forgotten. Think of Joe Rosenthal’s frame of
servicemen raising the flag over Iwo Jima, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s snap of a sailor
smooching a nurse in Times Square, Nick Ut’s photo of a naked child fleeing a
napalm attack in Vietnam.
From its earliest days, photography has served to bring us in contact with
unseen realities. As the New York Times editorialized after an exhibition of
Alexander Gardner’s unprecedented photographs of dead soldiers on the
Antietam battlefield in 1862: “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our
dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”
As a check on that power, we ask that the reality inside the frame be
authentically real. It becomes a matter of great moment whether Robert Capa
really caught a soldier in the moment of death, or Rosenthal’s picture might have
been a re-enactment, or Gardner’s bodies were artfully arranged. We license the
photographer to see the world with special acuity, to record it, to capture, in the
words of Alfred Stieglitz, “a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than
reality.” But the germ must be real.
We live in a world transformed by photography, and the transformation
continues at a blinding pace. Photography allows us to go anywhere, to see
almost anyone, to witness life from womb to tomb, to peep inside palaces and
hovels, to venture beyond the stars and beneath the seas, to be exalted by the
beauty of a tender touch and revolted by the ugliness of an ISIS execution.
Now we’ve reached an age when everyone is a photographer and every scene
a potential photograph. On social media, the photograph has become a kind of
existential statement: I am here! Can you see me? Power has shifted from the
photographer to the viewer, who has an almost infinite number of images to
choose from.
Photography is a mode of communication, after all, which is to say a back
and forth, give and take. The photographer frames a glimpse of the world; the
viewer interprets and responds to it. There is potential for power and even
revelation in both roles. We are, perhaps, moving ever closer to the ideal
expressed by Edward Steichen: “When I first became interested in photography,
I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of
the fine arts. Today, I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of
photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.”

Von Drehle, a TIME editor at large, is the author of Rise to Greatness: Abraham
Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year.
CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTRIBUTING CURATORS David Campbell; Charlotte Cotton; Philip Gefter; W.M. Hunt; Erik
Kessels, KesselsKramer; Susan Kismaric; John Loengard; Santiago Lyon; The Associated Press; Azu
Nwagbogu; African Artists’ Foundation; Fred Ritchin; International Center of Photography; Carol Squiers;
Aidan Sullivan, Getty Images; Anne Wilkes Tucker; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

REPORTERS Melissa August; Erica Fahr Campbell; Richard Conway; Ben Cosgrove; Eric Dodds; Alex
Fitzpatrick; Alice Gabriner; Krystal Grow; Bridget Harris; Olivier Laurent; Myles Little; Michelle Molloy;
Noah Rayman; Maya Rhodan; Liz Ronk; Lily Rothman; Marisa Schwartz Taylor; Mia Tramz

WRITERS Sean Gregory; Andrew Katz; Jeffrey Kluger; Daniel S. Levy; Matt McAllester; Kate Pickert;
Josh Sanburn; David Von Drehle (section introductions); Bryan Walsh

SPECIAL THANKS TO Dr. Shahidul Alam; Dora Apel; Bobbi Baker Burrows; Miles Barth; Irina
Chmyreva, Ph.D.; Judith Cohen; Emmanuel de Merode; Yumi Goto; Bill Hooper; Roberto Koch; Silvia
Mangialardi; Pablo Ortiz Monasterio; Kathy Moran; Andrei Polikanov; Manuel Rivera-Ortiz; Mark
Sanders; Michael Sanders; Harsha Vadlamani; Paul Weinberg; Luis Weinstein; Ann Drury Wellford; Wim
Wenders; Deborah Willis, Ph.D.
IMAGE CREDITS

COVER/ENDPAPERS
Cover: Ron Haviv—VII; © Estate of Yousuf Karsh; Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images; Ellen DeGeneres—Twitter via Getty Images; © Bettmann/Corbis; © 2010 MIT.
Harold E. Edgerton Collection, MIT Museum. Used with permission; Library of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516]; Neil Leifer—
Sports Illustrated; Photograph © Harry Benson Endpapers: Photos by Philippe Halsman © Halsman
Archive (front); © Donna Ferrato (back)

FRONT MATTER
Page 2. © 2015 Rockefeller Group Inc./Rockefeller Center Archives 4. Photograph by Leslie Davis.
Courtesy the Halsman Archive 10. Robert Capa—© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
12. Carte de visite: Courtesy of Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum 14. Jet magazine:
Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC 15. Marlboro: Digital image courtesy of the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York 18. Joseph Niépce—Getty Images; © Philippe Kahn, Courtesy Fullpower
Technologies 19. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number LC-DIG-
ppmsca-06607] 20. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection,
[reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516]; John Filo—Getty Images 21. Ellen DeGeneres—Twitter via
Getty Images

ICONS
Page 24. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number LC-USZ62-5803] 26.
© Bettmann/Corbis 28. © Donna Mussenden VanDerZee 30. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516] 32. Margaret Bourke-White
—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 34. © Estate of Yousuf Karsh 36. Library of Congress, Prints
& Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b14845] 38. Hulton
Archive/Getty Images 40. Joe Rosenthal—AP 42. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis 44. Alfred
Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 46. Margaret Bourke-White—The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images 48. © The Estate of Nat Fein 50. W. Eugene Smith—The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images 52. Courtesy of The Hy Peskin Collection—www.hypeskin.com 54. Dovima With
Elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955. Photograph by Richard Avedon. ©
The Richard Avedon Foundation 56. © Korda Estate, Courtesy of Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 58.
© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) 60. © Malick Sidibé—Courtesy
Gallery Fifty One 62. Photograph © Harry Benson 64. Neil Leifer—Sports Illustrated 66. Sovfoto/UIG via
Getty Images 68. John Dominis—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 70. © Don McCullin/Contact
Press Images 72. Ron Galella, Ltd./WireImage 74. The New York Times/Redux 76. Susan Meiselas—
Magnum Photos 78. © Co Rentmeester 80. © Therese Frare 82. © Annie Leibovitz/Contact Press Images

EVIDENCE
Page 86. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 88. Library of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs, [reproduction number LC-DIG-cwpb-01097] 90. Prints &
Photographs Division, Edward S. Curtis Collection, [reproduction number LC-USZ62-37340] 92. Digital
image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 94. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, [reproduction number LC-USZ62-11278] 96. MS
Russ 35 v. 3 (42), Houghton Library, Harvard University 98. Heinrich Hoffmann—Timepix/The LIFE
Picture Collection/Getty Images 100. © Bettmann/Corbis 102. H.S. Wong—Office of War
Information/National Archives/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 104. Dmitri Baltermants—TASS
106. Keystone/Getty Images 108. Weegee (Arthur Fellig)—International Center of Photography/Getty
Images 110. Robert Capa—© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos 112. Office of War
Information/National Archives 114. Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved. 116.
© Peter Leibing, Hamburg 118. Charles Moore—Black Star 120. Malcolm Browne—AP 122. Zapruder
Film © 1967 (Renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza 124. Eddie Adams—AP 126. Josef
Koudelka—Magnum Photos 128. NASA 130. John Filo—Getty Images 132. Nick Ut—AP 134. Kurt
Strumpf—AP 136. © Stanley J. Forman—www.stanleyformanphotos.com—Pulitzer Prize 1976 138. ©
Sam Nzima 140. Eddie Adams—AP 142. Jahangir Razmi—Magnum Photos 144. © Donna Ferrato 146.
Jeff Widener—AP 148. Ron Haviv—VII 150. James Nachtwey 152. © Kevin Carter—Sygma/Corbis 154.
Michael Nichols—National Geographic Creative 156. Richard Drew—AP 158. AP Photo 160. © Tami
Silicio 162. Chris Hondros—Getty Images 164. Brent Stirton—Getty Images 166. Official White House
photo by Pete Souza

INNOVATION
Page 170. Joseph Niépce—Getty Images 172. GraphicaArtis/Getty Images 174. Digital image courtesy of
the Getty’s Open Content Program 176. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction
number LC-DIG-ppmsca-06607] 178. Jacob A. Riis/Museum of the City of New York 180. U.S. National
Library of Medicine 182. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 184. Digital image
courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 186. © 2015 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung
Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Cologne/ARS, NY 188. © bpk, Berlin/Berlinische Galerie, Berlin,
Germany/Erich Salomon/Art Resource, NY 190. Henri Cartier-Bresson—Magnum Photos 192.
Keystone/Getty Images 194. Robert Capa—© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos 196.
Photo by Philippe Halsman © Halsman Archive 198. © Robert Frank from The Americans; courtesy
Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York 200. © 2010 MIT. Harold E. Edgerton Collection, MIT Museum. Used
with permission. 202. Lennart Nilsson—TT 204. NASA 206. Cindy Sherman, Courtesy of the artist and
Metro Pictures 208. © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission 210. Nancy Burson and
ClampArt Gallery, NYC 212. Andres Serrano, courtesy Donation Yvon Lambert to the French State (Centre
National des Arts Plastiques) 214. © Richard Prince. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery 216. NASA 218. ©
Philippe Kahn. Courtesy Fullpower Technologies 220. © 2015 Andreas Gursky/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 222. YouTube 224. David Guttenfelder—AP 226. Ellen
DeGeneres—Twitter via Getty Images
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 100 PHOTOGRAPHS the most influential images of all time

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